Gavan Reilly: Zappone jobwas certain to be a scandal: why didn’t they see it coming?

Let’s be upfront about one thing first. All jobs of special envoys involve a certain level of cronyism.

Ireland only has two special envoys right now; one of them is Tom Arnold, who is the government’s ‘special envoy on food systems’. Arnold could already be earmarked as a crony - a previous FG government made him chair of Ireland’s Constitutional Convention - but he’s also involved in food security issues at a UN level, and he’s a former CEO of Concern.

As it happens, he was given the job in the same week as Katherine Zappone was given hers. Was there a need for transparency? Ideally, but in practice, no: Arnold evidently knows his stuff. (The other envoy is Ireland’s envoy to Francophone Africa, given to lifelong diplomat Kenneth Thompson. An insider’s job that only an insider could do.)

So the government ought to at least be upfront that envoy jobs aren’t like civil service roles filled through open appointment. If someone is available and deploying them would be in Ireland’s interests, you do it. We already do it internally: when Enda Kenny set up a taskforce to try and reinvigorate the North Inner City, did he do a public tender before hiring Kieran Mulvey to do it? No: Mulvey was an envoy in all but name.

The difference with Zappone is that, even despite her previous career addressing educational disadvantage through An Cosán, or her advocacy for gay rights, Zappone is still an insider of a different level. Even the most skilled advocates don’t live in a world where they can ring up Paschal Donohoe to discuss their prospects for work in the UN: you can only do that if you’ve sat at the cabinet table with him for four years. Nor can Donohoe simply refer you onto Simon Coveney, even if you’re a high-ranking outsider: you have to have been a colleague of his too. One contact begets another, which begets another… doors open which don’t open unless you are who you are. There’ll be lots written in the coming days about the timeline of Zappone’s appointment, how Micheál Martin was kept out of the loop for four or five months, and the power imbalance between the guy running the country and the party he shares power with. But there’s two underlying points that should not be ignored.

The first is that, when appearing before the Oireachtas Foreign Affairs committee last week, Simon Coveney said Zappone was only actually given the job - without lobbying! - once the Department had realised there might be merit in creating such a role. Yet the paper trail doesn’t show even any cursory meetings about its value until March 23, three weeks later. Was the Oireachtas misled?

And secondly, more importantly: the failure to realise that appointing an ex-colleague to an envoy role, no matter how low the pay, is a sign of total detachment. Neither Coveney, Leo Varadkar nor Micheál Martin raised alarm - how much of that is down to their 35 years collective cabinet experience?