Cronyism claims over Zappone don’t stack up 

Still, the story was gold dust for Sinn Féin. As Eoin Ó’Broin wrote in an article for Magill in 2013: “Sinn Féin’s entire political project, including our opposition to austerity, is populist, and unashamedly so.”

Populism “pits the people against an elite”, he said. “It values the wisdom of ordinary women and men over the technical knowledge of the expert.” Ó’Broin returned to the theme on political scientist Aidan Regan’s podcast last year, saying: “When Mary Lou McDonald or Gerry Adams rail against ‘the elites’, which we regularly and rightfully do, that’s a populist strategic manoeuvre.” Depicting the Zappone appointment as cronyism that thereby proved how detached this elite are from the people was straight out of the populist playbook.

If populism promotes the belief that the “elites” act in their own interests, and against the interests of the people, then elitism can be defined as the belief that the experts know better than the people how to manage their interests. (Elitism, in this sense, is roughly synonymous with technocracy.) All political systems contain elements of elitism. For the past year-and-a-half we have been living through a mass experiment in elitism as large measures of political authority were ceded to unelected expert bodies: Nphet is the epitome of elitism.

Populism and anti-elitism run deep in Irish politics, to its roots: British power in Ireland was quintessentially elitist (it was other, worse things too). Reading the Dáil debates on the Treaty recently, I was struck by how often TDs justified themselves by reference to their connection to “the people”. “I am the representative of an Irish stock,” Michael Collins declared. “I was reared in a labourer’s cottage here in Ireland,” Éamon de Valera said to applause. “I have not lived solely amongst the intellectuals.”

I interviewed Garret FitzGerald shortly before he died, and he despaired of the increasing tendency, as he saw it, to disparage ideas or people by calling them elitist. “Elitist is a most dangerous word,” he said. “Anything sensible is called ‘elitist’.” The point of representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy, was to moderate the whims and excesses of the electorate, he said, “otherwise we’d have capital punishment”. Nphet may have got things wrong, but nobody would have wanted to run the public health response by plebiscite.

There are risks inherent in both populism and elitism. The Irish political scientist Peter Mair described the “hollowing” of western democracy in his seminal 2013 book, Ruling the Void, which lamented the decline of political parties as vehicles of mass representation and the filling of that void by technocratic liberal democracy. The end result of this process, he forecast, could be to erode the legitimacy of the political system itself.

The populist impulse is a vital brake on this tendency; but populism has its own excesses. Delegitimising expertise undermines the capacity of government itself — Donald Trump’s administration being a useful case study. As the English writer Eliane Glaser puts it in her book, Elitism: A Progressive Defence: “We may come to realise too late that the democratic institutions we were led to despise are actually the imperfect but necessary bulwarks that protect us from arbitrary power.”

The middle ground here is a space occupied by dull-but-worthy concepts such as “process” and “transparency”. Nphet may have entailed a break with established crisis-response process, but it demonstrated impressive transparency and quickly won public support. By contrast, its British counterpart, Sage, was more secretive and the process of its interaction with Downing Street more opaque; the result was a crisis response that struggled to achieve widespread popular legitimacy.

Katharine Zappone has had a substantial career in the promotion of human rights and social justice, at community level, as an activist and as a politician. She reportedly did useful work supporting the Government’s successful bid for a term on the United Nations Security Council. That role entails a huge extra workload for the diplomatic service. Zappone is based in New York and is well networked within the Irish, American and UN systems. It makes sense she could be of value as some kind of roving envoy. Yet, for all that there might be merit in the appointment, it was sorely lacking in process and transparency.

The need for such envoys is not identified in either the Government’s foreign policy or international development policy documents. Micheál Martin described this appointment as a “pilot”, but said there was “no further programme for the appointment of special envoys”; he gave no details of how any subsequent, wider scheme might work. Having let the issue stew for much of the week, Simon Coveney told Bryan Dobson on Friday that his department had developed a “concept paper” around the role of special envoy, based on the precedent of other countries, but the connection between LGBT rights, on which the role was originally to focus, and “freedom of expression” remained vague. Although the role was widely described as either a United Nations envoy or an envoy to the United Nations, there is no formal connection to the UN.

Populism has been described as a “paranoid style” of politics because it always seeks — and finds — a conspiracy of the elites. Was this conspiracy or merely cock-up? I incline to the latter school of political analysis. But I would be less paranoid about elitist shenanigans: I’m a Dublin 4-born, private school-educated member of the commentariat whose other job is as a playwright and whose brother served in the Cabinet — alongside Katherine Zappone. I’m basically a caricature of the liberal media elite.

Politics is about judgment. To argue that a government minister should not be able to appoint a part-time envoy on €15,000 a year, coincident with a rare opportunity for the country in membership of the United Nations Security Council, is to infantilise political authority.

But botch such appointments and the Government risks bringing the whole system down. Because of a mistake in cabinet procedure, a lack of transparency about the appointment, a week of failure to clarify crucial details and an enduring vagueness about the process, this appointment was botched. That doesn’t make it cronyism; but you don’t have to be paranoid to think it was.