Unlike most politicians, Robert Watt wants the reality of power but not the theatre

It is not the impudence of Robert Watt, the secretary general of the Department of Health, that is the issue. It is the impotence of the politicians who interrogated him at last week’s hearing of the Oireachtas committee on finance. Focusing on the baroque character of Watt misses the point and it is also a useful distraction for him. Neither is the issue of what he did in relation to the botched appointment of Dr Tony Holohan to a professorship at TCD. It is the broken system of the appointment, tenure and responsibilities of secretaries-general. What is left over now is a 19th-century system, stranded in a culture in which it can’t cope.

In a functioning system, Watt would not be secretary general at the Department of Health. Secretaries-general were intended to have seven-year terms which could be extended to 10. What was to be an exceptional measure happened too easily. To provide for their exit before they accrued full pension entitlements, an add-on of up to seven years was provided. It was expensive but it was also a good investment and should have provided throughput. But the jiggery-pokery at that time started almost instantly. When departmental functions changed, secretaries-general on the move restarted the clock on their seven-year terms. What was to be a highly focused seven years, properly compensated for on exit before normal retirement age, too often became an extended tour.

Whatever happened behind the scenes, responsibility for the debacle of his appointment and salary was entirely political

Still, if observed in the breach, it was better than before. Two different things happened: first, politicians kicked away the exit ramp from the system for new secretaries-general after the economic crash. It was a false economy and former incumbents are now accumulating in ad hoc arrangements in the public service after their term ends. The system needs the clean break previously provided for.

Second — in a system of Civil Service leadership already gumming up — after 10 years as secretary general in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, Robert Watt was appointed secretary general in Health. It was a colossal failure of nerve by the Government. The arrangements for his much-increased salary made Watt’s own arrangements for Holohan seem exemplary. Whatever happened behind the scenes, responsibility for the debacle of his appointment and salary was entirely political.

We now know which hospitals are overspending and which are delivering. Let’s fund them accordingly

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Next election will herald an age of Independents

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The idea this Government has another year is constitutionally correct but politically preposterous

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‘Political advisers are like poisoners: either famous or good at their job’

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The political ruckus about Watt’s attitude in front of the committee is especially ironic. The coarsening of political debate is a fact of political life. Committees too often are bear pits for mauling witnesses. Politesse left Irish politics a long time ago.

Watt’s demeanour plays out as bad opera but worse, it is unwise. He has, presumably purposely, avoided several opportunities to talk down this issue. The immediate aftermath was one occasion; his own unsatisfactory report was another. What he did last week ricocheted this back at his Minister, Stephen Donnelly. Humiliated once by being blindsided, he will be put on the rack again before this is over. As any other civil servant could have told Watt, if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.

[ ‘A bit of contrition would have been wiser’: Robert Watt and the row that won’t go away ]

The secretary general missed his vocation as a politician. His youthful associations in Labour coincided with the emergence here, and in New Labour in Britain, of a new supercharged class of advisers, who knew better than ordinary members and elected parliamentarians, and swaggered accordingly. Watt the civil servant was not party political. But has he ever fully understood the boundaries between politics and the Civil Service? In that, he is an outlier, but he has become a lighthouse for deeper dysfunction around accountability.

His ultimate lack of political nous was in actioning what he probably correctly understood what the Government wanted, namely Holohan’s exit. The former chief medical officer may be a secular saint, but he has few acolytes in Cabinet. The botched execution of the move was a continuation in changed circumstances of virtual wartime powers that had accrued to Watt and Holohan during Covid. But the war was over and the Government had decommissioned the generals. He should have read Murder in the Cathedral first. Anticipating the wishes of politicians brings no immunity when things go wrong.

It is fiction that civil servants are personally accountable to an Oireachtas committee

The essence of this issue is not an unaccountable civil servant; it is incapable politicians who don’t understand the difference between office and power. With some updating in the 1990s, the core relationship between a minister and a secretary general remains encoded in the Ministers and Secretaries Act, 1924. It leaves the minister nominally responsible for nearly everything, while the vast administrative powers of the secretary general are only accountable to the minister.

It is fiction that civil servants are personally accountable to an Oireachtas committee. The secretary general as accounting officer is responsible to the Public Accounts Committee for assuring that money is spent on what it was allocated for. But apart from that retrospective audit, official responsibility is to the minister only, who is personally responsible for his officials to the Oireachtas.

Parliamentary scrutiny and accountability are working as intended — which is to say not well. Politicians who create a cottage industry out of wailing their frustrations in public have the legislative responsibility to change the system they complain about. But they never have. They want the theatre of power but cannot enact reality. Watt, in contrast, wants the reality of power, but cannot perform the theatrics of democratic accountability.