Opinio Hiberno: Mary Harney’s Mother

My recent days have involved Mary Harney to a greater extent than I think I could possibly feel comfortable with, but between reading about her mother’s surgery in Ireland on Sunday and being contacted by the people who own and run this site about a new feature I’ve just not been able to get her out of my head. Instead of the usual crass jokes that are bandied about in relation to Harney the recent buzzing noise has been all about whether her mother was given preferential treatment in Tallaght Hospital when she jumped a queue of two people waiting for surgery in order to get a hip operation. First off there are a couple of points to be made about this
(a) The story makes it sound like she sidled up to the operating theatre doors and elbowed her way past two other people; hospital waiting lists don’t work like normal waiting queues!

(b) If Mary Harney did exert any pressure whatsoever to have her mother treated before others it would certainly be a serious misuse of her position, however it doesn’t really appear that people think she did, rather there is some suspicion that her mother was given preferential treatment because of who she was;

(c) If this is so, then it simply highlights the colloquial nature of politics and service provision in this country that comes from the bottom up as well as from the top down

The real issue in all of this, however, is not whether the decision to operate on Mrs. Harney was one of medical judgement or political contacts; rather it is whether this story is fair game for consideration at all. Even the normally politically ruthless contributors over at www.politics.ie revealed a soft inner core in response to the Tanaiste’s evident upset at this allegation. Harney denies that she exerted any pressure to ensure that this happened and I have no reason to disbelieve her, but let me put it this way: if influence was used wouldn’t Ireland on Sunday have been right to print the story citing a legitimate public interest in it? Also if influence wasn’t directly applied but who Mrs. Harney was played a role in her treatment wouldn’t that also be a matter of legitimate public interest?

But surely the relatives of someone in the public eye shouldn’t be dragged into the matter, right? Well, not necessarily so. If they are material to a question of legitimate public interest then yes, they should. Therefore a minister taking their children out of school to go on holidays or someone employing their brother as a high paid shoe shiner would be relevant, even though it deals with a member of the family. Equally if the public figure themselves has made their relative a tool in their public discourse then certainly they have been made into fair game. What I mean by this is that if Johnny, a politician, is banging on about family values and the sanctity of marriage in an election campaign complete with his perfect wife and children in tow, and it transpires the children are crack heads and the wife is running a lesbian sex ring then that is fair game. Mary Harney made her mother’s illness and treatment part of the public discourse by speaking about her in the context of a health care debate on Liveline.

This story may be in bad taste, and I have no doubt that it caused distress to Mrs. Harney herself; most people may dislike the newspaper that published it (and, indeed, that company’s whole collection of ‘news’papers); most people would think the story should have been reported more accurately and more sensitively, but there is an arguable point here for legitimate public interest in whether or not a politician’s relative gets preferential, not better, care.