MARY Harney and Brendan Drumm sat alongside each other last Friday week as they welcomed the new contract for hospital consultants. Six days later it was revealed that the entire orthopedic department at Our Lady's Hospital in Navan would close for the month of December due to financial cutbacks. But Harney was missing for the latter announcement. RTE News reported that the health minister was making no comment. When there's good news, the minister is joined at the hip with the HSE, but when the message is a negative one the HSE stands alone. Just like when it comes to tricky parliamentary questions Harney's department won't provide answers to . . . they are the business of the HSE. A variation of this strategy was recently adopted by Eamon O Cuiv.

The HSE was an "impossible organisation to deal with, " he concluded. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was following a similar theme last week in relation to Aer Lingus and the ShannonHeathrow debacle. "We are trying our best, if it is possible . . . but I cannot guarantee certainty . . . to assist them, " Ahern asserted. There is a common strand to Harney and O Cuiv speaking about the HSE and Ahern taking about Aer Lingus. These people are in office but they are not in power. Memo to Mary, Eamon and Bertie . . . you have been elected to run the country, not to sit on the sidelines as others apparently make the decisions that impact on the quality of people's lives. The transfer of huge areas of governmental responsibility to external organisations is a convenient ploy by politicians who want to take all the praise but none of the blame. Brian Lenihan recently criticised this deliberate devolution of power away from ministers. But Lenihan was pointing the finger of blame at his own government. This is the worst of the Bertie Ahern School of Politics: when the news is bad, there is always somebody else to blame.

Yet, with a difficult winter ahead in the health services, this opt-out type of government may be hard to sustain.

Brendan Drumm and his colleagues will meet with Oireachtas members in early November. Across all the parties in Leinster House, politicians privately talk about their unwillingness to personalise their remarks on the HSE by targeting Drumm. But political patience with the HSE boss is nearly gone. It was not reported during the general election, but had Pat Rabbitte's Labour Party entered government one of its aims was to give Drumm specific targets and a fixed timetable for delivery. Failure to meet those targets and Drumm would have been given his marching orders. The HSE budget cutbacks show an organisation still riddled with dysfunctionality. We hear repeatedly about the 14bn annual health budget. The 250m overrun accounts for 1.8% of the total budget in 2007. A small amount of money seems to be causing a considerable amount of organisational upheaval in the HSE, and huge distress to patients and their families. One can only assume that no bonuses will be paid to Drumm and other senior HSE personnel for their stewardship in 2007. It was John Reid, after his appointment as British Home Secretary, who famously labelled his department as 'not fit for purpose'. Soon, Brendan Drumm's HSE will be seen as 'not fit for purpose'. Not that Harney or other members of this government would comment. That, after all, would be a matter for the HSE.

LESS than half of the pledges made by Fianna Fail and the PDs during the 2002 general election were fully enacted during the life of the last government, according to new research by two TCD political scientists. The study will be discussed next weekend when the country's top political scientists gather for their annual conference.

The paper on the fulfillment of election pledges is based on research by Robert Thomson and Rory Costello.

They look at 117 promises made by FF and the PDs in areas including taxation, health and education: "By May 2007, 46% of these pledges were fulfilled; a further 24% were partially fulfilled; and the remaining 30% were not fulfilled.

This compares well with findings on the rate of pledge fulfillment by previous Irish governments and by coalition governments in other countries. However, it is a significantly lower fulfillment rate than has been observed in countries with single party government, such as the UK."

Some 25% of the pledges made by the opposition parties in 2002 were enacted despite those parties not being in government. Perhaps what Fine Gael and Labour have been offering the voters is all too similar to the Fianna Fail/PD prescription.

Government fully enacted less than half of its 2002 election promises