Justine McCarthy: We shouldn’t ask if Patrick O’Donovan is right for his job but if the job is right for him

Patrick O’Donovan boasted at the start of this year that he had the best job in the Government.“There isn’t a day in the life of an Irish person that is not touched by my department,” he told the Irish Examiner in January.Now the seat of the Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport is empty and the floor in the Cabinet room is carpeted in eggshells. Who’s afraid to speak of the minister’s ill health? Everyone, it seems – unless it’s strictly entre nous, off the record and not for quoting.Nobody with a shred of sensitivity wants to pore over somebody else’s health adversity in public. That natural reticence was compounded by a sequence of extraordinary events on October 13th when the 49-year-old Limerick politician, who has deep frontal lobe epilepsy, was rushed to intensive care. It happened just hours after he denounced an anonymous Fine Gael Cabinet colleague for questioning if his health condition was affecting his ability to do his job. The events of that day have snowballed into a political whodunnit with the revelation that his party leader, Tánaiste Simon Harris, had phoned O’Donovan shortly before he fell ill while chairing an EU presidency meeting.READ MOREThe dilemma palpitates with déja-vu. On St Stephen’s Day 2009, TV3 – now Virgin Media – reported that Brian Lenihan, the Minister for Finance handling the biggest financial crisis in the State’s history, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The television station and its political editor, Ursula Halligan, were pilloried for trespassing upon his and his family’s private trauma. Others argued that, though the report might have been postponed out of compassion until after the Christmas holiday, it concerned a significant public issue that warranted airing. Complaints were lodged with the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland which concluded that the minister’s state of health was a matter in the public interest.We are accustomed to American media scrutinising the health of US presidents. The White House voluntarily releases details of its incumbents’ annual medical check-ups. Close-ups of Donald Trump’s swollen ankles, bruised hands and impromptu forty-winks have accompanied extensive debate about his fitness to work. Karmic retribution, perhaps, for his Sleepy Joe sneers when his predecessor was exhibiting symptoms of declining mental acuity. Despite various news reports of Joe Biden falling on a stage, forgetting words and failing to recognise George Clooney at a fundraiser, Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor and co-author of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, its Cover-up and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again, has said the media did not adequately interrogate his state of health.The indelicacy and discomfort of putting a public person’s health on the national agenda is exacerbated in a country as small and intimate as Ireland. It is further exacerbated by the clubhouse atmosphere in Leinster House where politicians and journalists operate on an understanding of mutual dependence. The BAI observed that Halligan had been visibly sad in her report about Lenihan’s diagnosis. She knew the man, after all.O’Donovan is neither the US president nor the Irish finance minister but, by his own estimation, his ministerial brief affects the daily lives of more than five million people. Being a minister is taxing work. His portfolio had the distinction of bearing the most onerous title in Government – Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media – before he succeeded Catherine Martin as the minister last year. His snappier title omits his retained responsibility for media and the arts. The first rumpus awaiting him when he arrived in the department was the Arts Council’s binning of a proposed IT system that had cost €6.7m.Patrick O'Donovan pictured in early October. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times O’Donovan is on his second extended spell of sick leave this year. He became unwell at a cultural event in Brussels on July 7th and returned to work at the start of September. That absence seems to have been the catalyst for the anonymous remarks in a Sunday newspaper attributed to a Fine Gael Cabinet colleague that questioned his fitness for the job due to his health. O’Donovan came out fighting on the day he fell ill again, saying he had no problem with people criticising his politics but “leave my health out of it”.Oh, but, if only it could be so simple.The Government has announced that O’Donovan will remain a Cabinet member without portfolio during his absence. His workload is being temporarily assumed by Peter Burke, passing the most long-winded job title to the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment. Awaiting attention on his extra desk are next year’s Ryder Cup in Adare which is costing the country tens of millions of euro; RTÉ reform; a national women’s museum planned for Limerick; implementation of EU age restrictions on social media use; and the integration of camogie and women’s football associations into the GAA.O’Donovan has been frank about his fear of losing his job after he collapsed in the Dáil chamber in June 2023. He worried voters would not elect him if they knew about his condition. He told the Irish Examiner he subsequently felt compelled to reveal his diagnosis when an Irish Times columnist mooted that either his party colleague, Hildegarde Naughton, would be better suited to his ministerial role as she had “been known to darken the doors of a theatre occasionally” or alternatively Niamh Smyth of Fianna Fáil, who ably chaired the Oireachtas media committee hearings on RTÉ. O’Donovan explained that stage effects in some performance shows can trigger seizures for his type of epilepsy.Stress, too, is best avoided. Whether deliberate or not, there has been an innuendo in the reporting of Harris’s phone call to O’Donovan the day he was taken to hospital that something was said during the conversation that might have precipitated his admission to intensive care. Whatever was said, the imperative persists for the leader of a Government party to be able to speak to his ministers. Epilepsy Ireland says more than 45,000 people in the country have the condition and that nobody “should have their professional capabilities questioned solely because [of it]“. Few would argue with that and most wish the minister a quick recovery but he is a pugnacious politician not known for avoiding controversy. Recent examples involved his unrealised proposal for a teenagers’ culture card in the budget and the cancellation of €20 million promised to RTÉ.For his own sake, and for the sake of the people whose daily lives are touched by his department, it is legitimate to ask – not if he is right for his job – but if the job is right for him.