Government Buildings, where careers are made and unmade

It is the epicentre of political power in Ireland, where decisions affecting everyone living here are made.

The bank guarantee was settled on here, in the early hours of the morning, nine years ago. The inevitability of the troika was accepted here, and its arrival announced. Austerity was directed, recovery sensed and then overplayed. This was where they wanted to keep the recovery going from. It is where an unusual and still unsure Government was put together. Political careers are made here, and then undone.

Yet the Government Buildings complex, according to some who work there, is unsuited for the work going on in it.

“It’s too easy for people to go into their offices and close the door behind them,” says one person. “A lot of business is actually done by people bumping into one another on the corridors.”

The Merrion Street complex beside Leinster House is organised around four sides of a quadrangle with an entrance through a security-controlled gateway watched by military police.

The buildings house the leadership of the Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure (on the left of the front of the building as you look at it from outside); the Attorney General’s office (on the right); the Government press centre in the basement, where major press conferences and announcements are often held; the Cabinet Room where ministers have attended meetings since 1922; and the Department of the Taoiseach, the central hub of Government decision-making.

Ministerial corridor

Part of the north wing, on the right hand side looking in, is actually part of the sprawling Leinster House buildings, housing the ministerial corridor from where ministers work when the Dáil is sitting. Access to the Department of the Taoiseach is through a security door.

The Taoiseach’s office is tucked away on the south side of the building (left as you look in), overlooking the quadrangle. He has quick access through a rear door and lift to his car parked underneath an arch downstairs, in case of emergency. But visitors approach along the red carpet of an oval-shaped corridor, perhaps pausing at the Children of Lir sculpture in the small, domeless rotunda outside his office. They will pass his private office on the left, and on the right, the office occupied by Mark Kennelly, his long-time chief of staff and closest adviser.

At the far end of the Taoiseach’s oval corridor is the beginning of the long corridor that spans the entire length of the building. There are offices on one side of the corridor only – on the other, windows look across the quad towards the gates and Merrion Street outside. Walk along the corridor and the name plates on the doors are a roll call of the most senior civil servants: Philip Hamill, John Callinan, Martin Fraser, and political advisers Paul O’Brien and Angela Flanagan.

O’Brien and Flanagan have assumed a new importance since the departure of the Taoiseach’s long-time economic adviser Andrew McDowell to join the European Investment Bank during the summer.

McDowell’s departure, in the words of one senior civil servant who worked with him, left a “huge Andrew-shaped hole” in the political and policy capacity of Kenny’s operation. O’Brien and Flanagan have been promoted to plug it, with O’Brien responsible for economic, public finances and business issues, and Flanagan in charge of social issues, health and justice. Both answer to the Taoiseach.

One floor down, the Government press office is led by the Government press secretary Feargal Purcell, though Purcell spends much of his time upstairs with senior officials and politicians, and also functions as a de facto adviser to the Taoiseach.

The Government press office has three roles - managing the Taoiseach’s press relations, overseeing the Government’s wider communications strategy and also handling the longer term political message of the administration.

The week begins on Monday morning with a senior staff meeting chaired by Mark Kennelly and attended usually by Purcell, Flanagan, O’Brien, Kenny’s PA Sarah Moran (“She manages his political life, basically”) and Jack O’Donnell , a Castlebar native who came through the constituency office and who functions increasingly as Kenny’s personal press officer.

Other officials sometimes attend. They review the previous week and plan for the coming days, with the focus on the Taoiseach and his agenda.

This is followed later on Monday by a meeting of all Ministerial advisers, who clear the following day’s Cabinet agenda, seeking to iron out any difficulties and looking around the corner at any political issues the anticipated Cabinet decisions might throw up.

Kennelly runs this show, and is in constant touch with Tony Williams, a close associate of Shane Ross who has been appointed by the Independents to manage their relations with Fine Gael. He will shortly be joined by Donal Geoghegan, who previously worked in Government Buildings for the Green Party during the Fianna Fail-Green coalition. Their job is to stop policy differences from becoming political problems.

They have had some success in improving the mechanics of how Government works since its early, shaky days, but it is still prone to regular – if less public – breakdowns. “The machinery is better,” says one source, “but the Government is still weak”.

Kennelly also manages relations with Fianna Fail, largely through Micheal Martin’s chief of staff, Deirdre Gillane. The usual coalition rule of “no surprises” applies.

Manage the politics

While the political advisers – who are employed only as long as the Government survives – seek to influence and manage the politics, the permanent civil servants are focused on the work of Government. That, at least, is the theory. In reality, however, the lines are blurred between the roles of the two sides of the house the closer to the top you get.

After the Taoiseach, the most important person in the building is Martin Fraser, who occupies the twin positions of Secretary General to the Government and Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach. He is the most senior civil servant in the country.

As “sec-gen” to the Government, Fraser manages the Cabinet agenda, attends its meetings (the only official to do so), notes the decisions made, and briefs the Government press secretary afterwards so that decisions can be communicated to the media. As head of the Department of the Taoiseach, he is responsible for its 200 or so civil servants, organised across four divisions. But he is also a key adviser to the Taoiseach in those areas where policy and politics collide.

“Martin would have been central to working out things like the terms of reference to inquiries, and that kind of thing,” says one senior official.

Fraser’s axis with Robert Watt, secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure and another 40-something northside Dubliner, is one of the most important channels in the government of the country. If the Department of the Taoiseach is the cockpit of government, Public Expenditure is its engine.

Like some other senior officials (Watt included) Fraser’s diary can be viewed on his department’s website. But its dry catalogue of meetings attended and delegations received only hints at his centrality to the actual management of Government. Political leadership is only effective when it can give effect to its agenda by pulling the right levers. And Fraser has his hands on many of the levers.

Nuts and bolts

Though the week in Government Buildings revolves around the Cabinet’s Tuesday morning meeting, and to a lesser extent the Taoiseach’s Dáil appearances, much of the nuts and bolts work of Government is done through the system of Cabinet sub-committees. These have a wider membership of Ministers, advisers and senior officials and are often attended by outside officials. At the most recent meeting of the justice sub-committee, for example, Garda management personnel attended.

The sub-committees all meet on the same Monday, once a month. The Taoiseach rattles through them; an hour-and-a-half or so for each meeting, half an hour beforehand for briefing. A lot of the business of Government is thrashed out at committee level, where differences are often a good deal plainer and explicit than at Cabinet.

“Stuff is brought to Cabinet when it has reached finality - it is brought there for approval,” says one person who attends committees regularly. “The donkey work, the cajoling and the agreeing – that’s done at the committees.”