IT was one of those newsflashes that immediately registers, with a rare piquancy. Eoin Ryan was being promoted to the cabinet, as a junior minister. With responsibility for drugs.
Now anyone who knows Ryan will recognise immediately that he's one of the more interesting among the rather diverse collection of individuals gathered together under the Fianna Fail pennant. He's smart and urbane, and distinctly on the liberal wing of the party on social issues. He is a natural for office, and has arrived at an age where promotion was to be expected. But this particular job - now that raises another, fascinating kind of speculation entirely. Because, when it comes down to it, the choice of Ryan as so-called 'Drugs Czar' poses one starter question: does Bertie Ahern know what he's up to? And if so precisely what is it?
When Eoin Ryan was interviewed by Hot Press a couple of years ago, he acknowledged that he had used cannabis. Now, Bertie Ahern has appointed him to a job which will give him special responsibility for the Drug Task Forces. The announcement had barely been made when other newspapers began to ask the obvious. In response, a statement was issued by Ryan through the Fianna Fail press office. "Like a lot of other students at the time," it said, "I smoked cannabis a couple of times."
It is, of course, the standard tactic in situations like this - a variation on the theme of 'credible deniability'. Bill Clinton admitted smoking cannabis but insisted that he didn't inhale (not suffering from brain damage then, eh?). Mo Mowlam, recently appointed to head the British government's 'anti-drugs drive', went one step further. "I tried marijuana, didn't like it particularly and unlike President Clinton I did inhale," she commented. We have not, unfortunately, been told what Eoin Ryan's response to the cannabis experience was. Perhaps some day . . .
The rest of Eoin Ryan's statement was devoted to the usual platitudes. He said that he was "well aware of the peer pressure on young people to use drugs, often with harmful, and sometimes devastating consequences for them, their families and communities." He also emphasised his commitment to a strong anti-drugs policy.
In this regard, I hope that he was being at least slightly disingenuous. Because the appointment, coming as it does in the wake of Mo Mowlam's similar appointment in the UK, suggests that there may just be the beginning of a rethink in this part of the world on the drugs issue. To start with, I do believe that Mo Mowlam has the courage and the capacity to go beyond the conventional clichis in her attitude to the drugs question. She is single-minded enough to question received orthodoxies and - if necessary - to take on the civil servants who propound them. In that context, we may just see the debate on drugs, and cannabis in particular, opening up in Britain over the coming months, with Mowlam acting as facilitator.
Given the crazily punititive, law-and-order mad regime that has taken shape under the current Minister for Justice John O'Donoghue, the possibility of a similar shift taking place here had seemed remote, in the extreme. However Eoin Ryan's appointment sends out a different kind of signal entirely.
Now there are a number of interpretations possible here, to be fair. As follows: (1) Bertie Ahern wasn't aware of the implications of the appointment and, for better or worse, stumbled into it by chance; (2) Bertie knew exactly what he was doing and threw Ryan in at the deep end, figuring that he'd emerge from the experience somewhat bruised and chastened; or (3) like Mo Mowlam under Tony Blair, Ryan was appointed precisely because it was felt that he would have a particular aptitude for the job, and the sensitivity to the real issues to go with it. For the moment, I'm happy to assume it was the latter.
I suspect that Eoin Ryan knows better than anyone else in government that most of the anti-drugs propaganda which is churned out by the State and its agencies is blindly and stupidly hysterical. I suspect that he knows better than anyone else in government that it is, as a result, explicitly harmful in its effects because it undermines people's respect for the State and for the laws of the State. I suspect that he knows better than anyone else in Government that the definition of cannabis as a so-called 'gateway drug' is hopelessly flawed and inadequate. I suspect that he knows better than anyone else in Government that there is a real and important distinction between 'hard' drugs and 'soft' drugs and that this distinction should be meaningfully reflected in legislation. And I suspect that he knows better than anyone else in Government that there is a crucial question as to whether or not the entire machinery of prohibitionist policy on drugs represents the best or most appropriate response to dealing with the issue of the use and misuse of drugs in Irish society in the first place.
Opportunities like this may come only once in a lifetime. Eoin Ryan, on his own, will not be able to change the crazy, hypocritical wasteful and grossly ineffective approach which currently passes for public policy on the drugs issue here and elsewshere. But he does, potentially, have the best part of two years within which to initiate a real debate on drugs, and to create the context within which a more enlightened - and very importantly, a more effective - policy might be framed and activated. It will take courage and resolve. If he is serious about the job, he may well have to risk the possibility of being demonised. But he will be made politically, if he does show the strength of character necessary to go about this job intelligently and effectively.
Eoin Ryan has been handed a difficult and challenging brief - but also one of the ones that is potentially most rewarding in real, human terms. He could do very well with it. I hope he does.