Gavan Reilly: 'That Kanturk encounter will hurt FG deeply. Take it from someone affected'

For what it’s worth, I think this election campaign has been particular dull because the whole campaign has been about “how you’d spend the billions”. Not alone are the sums so big that they’re abstract for most voters, but the whole campaign has been a repeat of the Apple Tax discussion from two months ago. It’s been ten weeks of the same national debate.

And then we had Simon Harris’ interaction, all of 40 seconds, with Charlotte Fallon in Kanturk.

Disability services are the sleeper issue of the campaign. As one prominent TD told me last week - long before the encounter in Kanturk ever occurred - while it wasn’t coming up on every door, when it did come up it was by far the biggest concern being raised.

And, if you’ll let me take off my columnist hat and speak as a parent in that boat, I totally understand how they feel.

Some background might be helpful. Children’s disability services – and let’s only deal with children’s services for a moment – are run by a patchwork of local teams (CDNTs), designed in principle to co-ordinate a child’s interventions for (say) speech and language, occupational, or physio. A nice idea in principle, but in practice they’re woefully understaffed - and even ‘full’ staffing would be insufficient to properly intervene in the way the kids need.

A bigger issue is the fact that, by pure postcode lottery, not all of these services are run by the HSE. In areas where a charity already had a footprint, the charity runs the show. And crucially, because they’re outside bodies, they’re not automatically covered under public sector pay deals - meaning there is pay disparity between the HSE teams and the charity-run ones. The postcode lottery means those who live in the HSE territories are seen by teams with better staffing than the ones who live elsewhere.

For those of us who have to live with this reality every day (full disclosure: I am one such parent, with a child on the books of an understaffed charity-run CDNT), it’s an all-encompassing issue. Every day you wonder whether your child could be doing better; learning to speak clearly; learning to deal with sensory overload; learning to feed or clothe themselves… could they achieve more, if they were getting the right interventions? If the system was simply working as it should?

That pay disparity, with its knock-on consequence of the issues Charlotte Fallon was trying to raise when she was given such short shrift by Simon Harris last Friday. For those of us who live with the direct effects of that, the curt reply cut deeply.

That’s one consequence of a viral moment like that – and Harris has constructed a world in which he lives by the video, and consequently is susceptible to dying by the video.

That’s the other consequence. Because of the needs of our children, the parents of kids with disabilities don’t tend to have the social lives we’d like. We are consequently Very Online, often seeking comfort in WhatsApp groups with parents of other children in similar situations. And, when videos like this touch on the issues faced inside our communities, they go around at lightning speed.

I’ve seen two themes to the reactions from the video after it started circulating on Friday night. The first was to presume that this is Simon Harris’s true feeling on disability matters. I think this is a little uncharitable, and unfair: I don’t doubt Harris’ sincerity in wanting to make things better for families in situations like ours. His own subsequent comments about being the 16-year-old who saw his mother in tears, about the shortage of services, rings true to that.

The second reaction, I think, is the more potent one: the fact that, when challenged about the fruits of his labour in the sector, Harris was seen to simply dismiss the lived realities of people in this sector, refused to entertain any complaints in good faith, and turned on his heel within 40 seconds.

This is an especially important point because of another trait that Harris has exhibited in the last few weeks: that of nitpicking. In the ten-way debate on RTÉ last week, the Taoiseach started contesting the idea that he had “signed” the contract for the National Children’s Hospital (even though he accepted responsibility for it). He ended up looking like he was trying to evade responsibility for the issue, based only on a linguistic point. On another occasion, when someone approached him to complain that RTÉ weren’t covering a specific topic, Harris curtly pointed out that there was an RTÉ microphone in front of that person’s face right now.

Being confronted with the stasis of the disability sector - where kids like my daughter still can’t get the services they need, because the sector as a whole is under-resourced and there’s still disparity in how some teams are staffed - is not a comfortable situation for anyone. If I were a minister who’d presided over it for four years, I’d be upset to think my work had failed to make an impact. But I’d at least hope I’d be able to stand politely, to be a listening ear to the concerns, and to promise to do better.

If people think Fine Gael carries a touch of arrogance - and ultimately, every political party is trying to make the case that they are the only ones capable of running the country properly - then clippy, curt exchanges like this begin to resonate with voters. And when Harris has centralised the entire campaign around himself and his personality, these are the moments that matter.