Simon Harris's weakness has not been lack of empathy, but economic cop-on
Taoiseach Simon Harris
It has been, as consensus would have it, a miserable old week for Fine Gael, and particularly for Taoiseach Simon Harris.
A campaign strewn with gaffes and missteps has seen the party, hamstrung by poor optics, descend from clear election favourite in the polls to level pegging with Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin in little over a fortnight.
It is somewhat ironic that Harris, known much to his chagrin as the TikTok Taoiseach given the importance he puts on social media communication, should be undone in this manner.
Despite a ship-steadying performance by the Taoiseach at Tuesday night’s three-way leaders’ debate, the fact remains that for Fine Gael, the success of their new leader’s reign has been almost entirely wagered on the man’s unquestionable Duracell Bunny-esque energy, on his perceived ability to jumpstart all and sundry within the party from the funk it had fallen into under Leo Varadkar.
Despite those well-laid plans, somewhere in the past fortnight things have gone somewhat awry.
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The trick for Harris had always been to convince the more unengaged within the electorate that everything about him is shiny and new.
As he noted repeatedly at this week’s debate, he has only been in the Taoiseach’s job for the past seven months.
He is still learning the ropes as it were, or so goes the narrative.
In reality, Harris has been a TD since 2011, a minister since 2014, and has sat at Cabinet since 2016.
People may not recognise him from before, and may like the cut of his engaging jib, but the fact is he has been around a long time.
Irony again raises its head in the issue (and there have been a few) which has caused Harris the most trouble on the campaign trail — his ill-fated encounter with carer Charlotte Fallon in Kanturk last Friday night.
One of the problems has been with his team’s apparent attempts to stop RTÉ from posting the video of the interaction for all to see — the Streisand effect writ large: In trying to stage manage a situation they’ve made it 10 times worse.
I say ironic, however, given the issue has brought caring and disabilities to the fore of the campaign — where they should always be in truth but not in practice.
An interaction from five years ago between Harris and Paschal Donohoe — then respectively ministers for health and finance/public expenditure — shows in reality that historically in Government, Harris’s chief weakness has not necessarily been a lack of empathy, but of economic cop-on.
The letter in question, delivered to Harris from his colleague in July 2019 at the height of the uncertainty that was Brexit, has a distinctly exasperated tone.
In it, Donohoe stresses his deep concern that Harris has greenlit an additional €130m for the disabilities sector above his department’s budget.
He insists that the flow of money be stopped, and instead held centrally as a stopgap against “new developments”.
No further budgetary overruns should be countenanced, Donohoe says, “until we see credible plans and real traction on cost-reducing measures”.
Harris is told in no uncertain terms that in throwing such money around without approval he is making the minister for finance’s job “to deliver a sustainable budget, regardless of Brexit implications, next to impossible”.
The Taoiseach was not the first minister for health to get it in the neck from the wild west of finance that is the HSE.
His successor Stephen Donnelly has received similar letters in his time from his cabinet colleagues.
But the letter does call to mind a talking point oft-whispered by politicians and civil servants alike — that Harris is more comfortable with soundbites and approving budgetary asks than he is with dealing with the fallout from such actions.
That same notion also springs to mind in considering Harris’s dismissal of the idea at the first televised election debate that he was personally responsible for signing the contract for the €2.2bn National Children’s Hospital project, despite his having been minister for health at the time.
But on the other hand, regarding his caring side, it’s well known that Harris’s political origins swelled from his indignation at his family’s struggle to access supports for his younger brother Adam, who has autism. His caring bona fides are genuine.
And as we can see in the letter he received from Donohoe, the Taoiseach had no problem approving additional funds for the disabilities sector in his time as minister.
Meanwhile, the word all week has been that it will be Donohoe himself who will be Fine Gael’s go-to man for the final days of campaigning, the so-called ‘adult in the room’ who will steer the debate back to where the party is most comfortable — its stewardship of the economy.
Yet if Donohoe’s 2019 letter to his now leader shows anything, it’s that there is generally scarce room in Ireland for carers and those living with disabilities in a “sustainable” budget.
Election campaigns are full of contradictions — it may be Simon Harris’s misfortune that he is currently being blamed for the least of his failings.
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