Why is Mary Hanafin so unpopular?

Babaro

I'm reasonably new to Ireland, but I am trying to get a grasp on the country's politics. I think I've a decent understanding of the parties and where they stand, and the personalities within them.

Without wanting to get into politics per se, I understand why certain parties are unpopular for certain reasons. I get that people think FF wrecked the economy, that Labour are FG's little helpers, that SF are the IRA in suits, that FG are heartless Tories, and that the Greens are, well, the Greens. And so on.

Something I don't understand, however, is why Mary Hanafin in particular is so tremendously unpopular.

I know she was a minister in the last government, which is popularly perceived as having been unsuccessful; but so were plenty others, who don't seem to attract the sheer dislike she seems to provoke amongst people.

I thought initially it may have just been misogyny in play, but Frances Fitzgerald - for example - has risen to a much more important job and doesn't attract the opprobrium that Hanafin seems to. And then I thought it might be an anti-FF thing - but there doesn't seem to be the dislike towards other FF figures that there exists towards her.

I'd be grateful if you could help me understand this one, because I'm "getting" Irish politics, but I'm obviously missing something that's happened in the past that's resulted in her unpopularity.

mzungu

Her departments treatment of survivors of sexual abuse leaves a lot to be desired.

Today Ms Hanafin said that although the State may pursue costs from victims of child sexual abuse who take an action against the department, no decision is taken lightly and no one has ever lost their home as a result of such an action.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0323/87110-abuse/

THE Government has come under fire for threatening 248 people who claim they were sexually abused at school and are taking legal action against the State.

The letters warned that claimants could face legal costs similar to the ?500,000 bill faced by Louise O'Keefe who last year lost a court case concerning abuse while she was a pupil in a Co Cork school.

http://www.independent.ie/life/family/learning/outrage-at-letter-threat-to-sex-abuse-claimants-26272021.html

Personally, for those actions alone she would not get my vote.

the groutch

Her signing off on paying €750m to unsecured bondholders, literally days before calling the 2011 election.

PopePalpatine

mzungu wrote: »

Her departments treatment of survivors of sexual abuse leaves a lot to be desired.


http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0323/87110-abuse/



http://www.independent.ie/life/family/learning/outrage-at-letter-threat-to-sex-abuse-claimants-26272021.html

Personally, for those actions alone she would not get my vote.

I suppose when you consider her father's reactionary Catholicism, any semblance of compassion for the RCC's victims is unthinkable.

Fr Tod Umptious

Back during the Cowan government Hanifan was usually the one rolled out to the media to spin each and every terrible decision.

She became the face of a incompetent administration.

Added to that the way she was shoe horned on to the ballot at the local elections, and the expense of a much younger candidate, made you wonder if FF were even interested in their own reform.

The optics around here were always bad since the bust.

golfball37

My personal favourite was her call to clamp out the compo culture in our schools whilst she helped her own mother sue the Dail for slipping in the public gallery.

parasite

I think it's mostly about a sense of money-grabbing entitlement with multiple pensions, combined with a pious Catholicism

or maybe it is misogyny :rolleyes:

glacial_pace71

In fairness to Hanafin I don't think she can be blamed for defending the State's position on legal responsibility for day school abuse cases. She didn't write Articles 41 and 42 of Bunreacht na hÉireann, which pretty much leaves the State funding the education system, (e.g. paying the teachers' salaries, paying capitation grants per pupil, paying capital grants towards building costs) whilst the schools remain owned and managed by private bodies such as religious orders.

ARTICLE 41
1 1° The State recognises the Family as the natural
primary and fundamental unit group of Society,
and as a moral institution possessing inalienable
and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior
to all positive law.
...
ARTICLE 42
1 The State acknowledges that the primary and
natural educator of the child is the Family and
guarantees to respect the inalienable right and
duty of parents to provide, according to their
means, for the religious and moral, intellectual,
physical and social education of their children.
2 Parents shall be free to provide this education in
their homes or in private schools or in schools
recognised or established by the State.
3 1° The State shall not oblige parents in violation
of their conscience and lawful preference to send
their children to schools established by the State,
or to any particular type of school designated by
the State.
2° The State shall, however, as guardian of the
common good, require in view of actual conditions
that the children receive a certain minimum
education, moral, intellectual and social.
4 The State shall provide for free primary education
and shall endeavour to supplement and give
reasonable aid to private and corporate
educational initiative, and, when the public good
requires it, provide other educational facilities or
institutions with due regard, however, for the
rights of parents, especially in the matter of
religious and moral formation.
5 In exceptional cases, where the parents for
physical or moral reasons fail in their duty
towards their children, the State as guardian of the
common good, by appropriate means shall
endeavour to supply the place of the parents, but
always with due regard for the natural and
imprescriptible rights of the child.

Basically the State "provides for" education, it doesn't "provide" it. The State has lost cases on compulsory schooling in the past. Hanafin actually tried to get the religious orders to budge a little on the issue of school patronage and on school management structures/accountability. They just ran down the clock. Batt O'Keeffe would be regarded as a far less effectual Minister.

When Ruairí Quinn's advisers tried to get the RC hierarchy's education committee to at least pause and reflect on how their school autonomy obsession protects paedophiles they simply briefed their FG colleagues with a series of off-the-shelf attacks. (Not blaming FG Ministerial advisers for doing their masters' bidding but even otherwise-sensible journalists like Pat Leahy duly reported the rout of Labour on the lines of "they tried to use the occasion to resurrect their failed attempt at reviving the debate on school patronage. They got nowhere").

At the end of the day there are plenty of FF and FG politicians who'll genuflect unquestioningly on matters that could be misconstrued by them as having a legitimate theocratic dimension. It can't be laid at Hanafin's door.

Btw several members of the Irish judiciary still regard the ECHR case as having been wrongly-decided and it making a mockery of Irish constitutional law. (Hardiman has stated publicly and privately his disagreement with the ruling). I suppose the ECHR are in the same ballpark now as the Irish Supreme Court was in the 1970s, e.g. back then judges plucked "unenumerated rights" from sub-clauses of sub-clauses as a means of addressing all sorts of issues politicians had simply declared to be 'haram'. So we ended up with the McGee ruling on contraception etc. Judicial activism overcompensating for a lack of political spine or integrity.

Consider other issues that politicians avoided in the hope that the judiciary would hope to give them cover and then found that there were ultimately limits to judicial activism, e.g. the Eileen Flynn case, in which a teacher was sacked for being in a relationship with a separated man and starting a family with him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Flynn

Apologies for the lengthy post, but if Hanafin is to be criticised, the related matters of litigation, child abuse and Church/State relations are probably the least realistic grounds to take against her: practically no FF or FG politician wants to amend Article 42. (They regard the children's rights referendum as having given them a get-out clause in that regard).

I think the fact that Hanafin was regularly sent out to bat on behalf of an incompetent administration left her regularly looking foolish. Further, there's a condescending schoolmistress tone that annoys many. I'd imagine that an electoral defeat would bring home to her the changing of the guard, but if Hanafin were to win a seat then expect all sorts of internal FF crises post-election.

Prinkie

Babaro wrote: »

Something I don't understand, however, is why Mary Hanafin in particular is so tremendously unpopular.

I know she was a minister in the last government, which is popularly perceived as having been unsuccessful; but so were plenty others, who don't seem to attract the sheer dislike she seems to provoke amongst people.

People see Hanafin as everything that's wrong with Fianna Fail. The arrogance of being rejected by the people, spending four years gorging on state pensions (€520,000 since 2011) then pushing herself on a young candidate in Blackrock last year during the local elections.

Lt Dan

School teacher way in which she talks people down, having a lot to say but no actual policy, her conservative old school Catholic - Fianna Fail background, not going away when he lost her seat

Fratton Fred

golfball37 wrote: »

My personal favourite was her call to clamp out the compo culture in our schools whilst she helped her own mother sue the Dail for slipping in the public gallery.

Didn't she then form a relationship with the barrister who was coincidentally voted on to the board of trustees of the national gallery and then, again coincidentally, appointed a circuit court judge the day before new circuit judges were to get a significant decrease in salary?

hatrickpatrick

Hanafin tries to separate herself from FF's f*ck up and corruption. I've had campaigners for her on my doorstep who talk only of her as an individual - tough sh!t, you're aligned to (and whipped by) the party which ran Ireland into the ground. Your individual credentials are totally irrelevant as long as you continue to support and identify with that piece of crap party, so stop trying to pretend that you're not a Fianna Failer. You were part of the cabinet which destroyed Ireland.

That's my issue with her anyway. Her attitude is akin to a KKK member acting bemused when they don't get elected despite their hard work at building schools and factories - she acts like her membership of FF's last cabinet is an irrelevant elephant in the room. It isn't. She's part of a corrupt political party and was part of a corrupt government, ergo anything else she has to say is entirely irrelevant.

I'd have exactly the same attitude to anything any of our current ministers have to say during this election campaign, but I haven't come across any trying to disassociate from their government and focus on individual merit as if their actions in office are irrelevant. I wouldn't hold individual party members to that standard since they have absolutely no say on government policy, but ministers are a different matter.

Madd Finn

Babaro wrote: »

Something I don't understand, however, is why Mary Hanafin in particular is so tremendously unpopular.


I thought initially it may have just been misogyny in play, but Frances Fitzgerald - for example - has risen to a much more important job and doesn't attract the opprobrium that Hanafin seems to.

There is no comparison between Frances Fitzgerald and Hanafin. Fitzgerald is an intelligent, able and (from what I can see) decent woman. Her political career is also "self-made" in that she isn't the daughter or widow of another politician.

Hanafin is the scion of a Fianna Fail family. Her father and brother were both Senators. She was also a Cabinet minister in the reviled last Fianna Fail government and, like most such creatures, she ducked out of sight in advance of the General Election when it was clear they would get their come uppance. So many Ministers resigned and fled for the hills in the last weeks of that government that just about all of the remaining minsters held multiple portfolios, officially.

Of the remaining FF cabinet ministers that stood for re-election only three retained their seats: Micheal Martin, who had just become party leader because in Cork they will always back the local man who has just been given the big job; Eamon O'Cuiv, probably because he's De Valera's grandson; and, most saliently Brian Lenihan junior, who had been the Finance Minister at bailout time.

Why did HE of all people, who should have carried the largest can for the financial disaster as Finance Minister get re-elected? Probably because it was widely known he was dying of cancer, and yet he had not only stayed at his post and endured all manner of recriminations, some justified,some decidedly less so (such as when oikish British City Traders on a conference call amused themselves at his expense with lampoons of what they thought was an Irish accent) but he also put himself before the electorate for endorsement.

Whatever you say about Lenihan, he was courageous, and courage is probably the most universally admired of all virtues.

Hanafin, by contrast, played it safe. She was on permanent leave of absence from a state job (as a teacher) which meant that that job could not be given to another teacher on a permanent basis and so somebody else had to endure the uncertainty of casual work while she swanned around in the Dail. After taking the hiding in the 2011 election she disappeared from view for a time and is now coming back as if nothing happened and is demanding to be reinstated in the Dail.

I trust her constituents will give the appropriate answer.

Just my theory

golfball37

Hanafin did stand in 2011 didn't she? Her and john o donoghue won praise for it.
Ivana Batshic (change the c to t) beat her to fifth I think.

Hibrasil

I M H O Mary Hanafin has always appeared downright arrogant - no other way to say it!

Madd Finn

golfball37 wrote: »

Hanafin did stand in 2011 didn't she? Her and john o donoghue won praise for it.
Ivana Batshic (change the c to t) beat her to fifth I think.

OK I retract that. I got it wrong. I got mixed up with her retiring (temporarily) from politics just after.

(note to self: must use Internet for more checking sooner )

joe_five_pack

its the way she comes across , she has the manner of a school principal ( small rural school ) from the 1950,s

she is also very confident for one with such a modest track record

expectationlost

she did the least possible in the department of education

Unshelved

Still, she and her co-constituent Barry Andrews gave me the best laugh of the last general election. Both scions of Fianna Fáil royalty, both ministers, and both too full of themselves to give way to the other and move from the Dun Laoghaire constituency to Dublin South - much to the horror of FF HQ who saw the writing on the wall.

What happened? They both lost their seats. How I laughed.

I would have laughed louder if they hadn't forgone their pension - but not in Ireland.

Barry of course lost no time in becoming CEO of GOAL, on a salary of €95K a year. Hope he makes a better job of that than his father did in the Red Cross.

https://electionsireland.org/result.cfm?election=2011&cons=113

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/bosses-of-14-charities-get-salaries-over-100k-29707277.html

http://www.villagemagazine.ie/index.php/2009/11/chairman-and-secretary-general-of-irish-red-cross-resign-following-this-village-article/