How Very Dare You

By AM Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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Things don’t get easier for Catriona Ruane. Since becoming minister for education in the Stormont executive her incumbency has neither been marked by success nor panache. Often said to be serviced by the executive’s least able team of ministerial advisers her performance has at best been lacklustre. The handling of the academic transfer procedure has been an unmitigated disaster and her latest brush with adversity can only nudge her party colleagues towards the conclusion that she is a liability who puts the dull on any shine that the performances of other party members serving as ministers might give off.

Catriona Ruane really has no answer to allegations that she was out of order by taking her 12 year old daughter on a three day visit to Cyprus on school time. Ruane was speaking at a seminar on diversity and equality in the country having been invited there by the Reconstruction and Resettlement Council of Cyprus. True, many parents would have done likewise. On more than one occasion I took kids on holiday during their school term. It is probably true that Ruane’s child gained more from three days in Cyprus than she would have from the equivalent time spent at school. On a parental level Ruane may even be praised for giving time to her daughter in a pace dictated working world where children are often casualties of their parents’ schedule. ‘I as a parent, as a mother, made the decision to take my daughter with me, I stand by that decision … I am happy that my decision was both responsible and correct.’ As a mother perhaps but as a mother serving as a minister it is a different story.

The Achilles heel of Ruane is in her own ministerial guidance that parents should not take their children on holidays during the school term. This opens her up to an array of criticisms which she should have taken on the chin rather than resort to her party’s time honoured tactic of seeking to bully the interviewer asking the difficult but appropriate question.

It is bad enough that politicians don’t do their job. If broadcasters follow suit and fail to do theirs then society will know nothing about what those who govern get up to. Seamus McKee of the BBC stuck doggedly to his guns and rightly persisted with his questioning despite Ruanes’s attempts to accuse both him and the Irish News, the paper which broke the story, of gutter journalism. She sought to silence public discussion of a matter of public concern by telling McKee that it was disgraceful that her daughter would be brought into a discussion. The Belfast based paper she accused of launching a "dreadful attack" on her family. She said private matters should not be brought into "political battles".

In fact it was not her daughter at all who was being discussed but Ruane’s own behaviour in disregarding the guidelines she expects others to follow. In his riveting book On The Brinks former blanket man Sam Miller made the point about prisons being run by people who make rules they rarely obey. Seems to be the same in government. Ruane has ended up sounding less like a government minister trying to be taken seriously and more like Derek Faye, the gay character from a Catherine Tate sketch, with oleaginous voice to match, protesting 'how very dare you' to anyone suggesting that he is gay.

In addition to having dropped the ball in the Cyprus incident there is a further tackle, long called foul, which she has now ruled onside by her Cyprus defence. Mick Fealty drew attention to this in his Slugger O’Toole blog: Ruane now leaves herself in a weak position regarding the shambolic education system she presides over. Having just introduced the concept of choice on the basis of ‘parent knows best’ there will be no shortage of opponents and critics lining up to remind her of this in relation to academic section.

Saddest of all perhaps is that Ruane through her foolishness allowed a much more important issue than trips to Nicosia to be sidelined; the withdrawal of funding by the Irish government from an autism school in Armagh. The children there have lost more than most last week and a chance to publicly discuss it was ceded through a severe bout of efficiency deficit.