The Rogue Ministry Of Education

Governments in the Balearics have established a pattern of having at least one rogue ministry per administration. Under the last lot it was tourism. For almost three years prior to the Unió Mallorquina being ejected with great force from the coalition, it was the UM's bailiwick to pilfer as it wished. It was a ministry that was dysfunctional because tourism was the last thing on most people's minds. Under the current lot the baton of dysfunctionality was handed to education. Questionable competence and mad policy have provided us with a rich vein of knockabout comedy, but it is a ministry that had not been compromised by scandal. Until now.

Let's go back a little further than a week and to education minister Núria Riera standing up in the Balearic parliament and announcing her wish for there to be an "educational pact" with the opposition in order to "reclaim society". This reclamation, an attempt one supposes to restore public confidence in an educational system that has been ripped apart by a trail of governmental and union destruction, was to receive a severe knockback only two days after Riera's announcement. Making a pact with the opposition was going to be tough when the ministry itself was breaking its own internal pact.

Miquel Deyà has been the one constant among senior advisers in the ministry. He was the "strong man" at Núria's side when she was catapulted onto the ministerial throne vacated by the horribly out-of-her-depth Joana Camps. He was made education director-general. He lasted two months before resigning, citing the convenience of "personal reasons", a euphemism which always hides an alternative explanation. And so it proved. Deyà's personal reasons, he later explained, were to do with his declining a request (some might say demand) from Núria and Xisca Ramis, the director of the SOIB employment service and Partido Popular mayoral candidate in Lloseta, to transfer a teacher with PP affiliations from Menorca to Mallorca.

In itself this might not sound like grounds for resignation, but there was more. Xisca Ramis, said Deyà, wanted the teacher transferred as he was to play a key role in her campaign to be elected as mayor. This wholly non-educational purpose was the principal reason for him resigning. Deyà went on to explain that when he discovered that Xisca was seeking other means of ensuring the teacher's transfer, he phoned her and gave her a piece of his mind. "Who do you think you are?" It then emerged that the post to which the teacher was to be transferred was to be created specifically for him. Deyà, on the grounds of cost, could not approve this.

Riera has denied any irregularity, and President Bauzá has weighed in on her side. "She has told me she has not committed any illegality, so my support (for her) is total." The unions begged to differ, and on Thursday the main teachers' union, STEI-i, was off to the prosecutor, and not any old prosecutor. The union handed in a document for the attention of anti-corruption prosecutor Pedro Horrach, claiming, among other things, that there had been a peddling of influence and suggesting that the whole saga was just "the tip of the iceberg" of irregularities in hirings made by the ministry. Taking cover perhaps, Núria cancelled at the last minute a meeting with the educational community in Arta. "Agenda issues" had got in the way, it was said. For Núria, these issues are increasingly difficult. She entered the ministry with a degree of goodwill. She offered a more sympathetic presence to both her predecessors - Rafael Bosch and Joana Camps. She might indeed have secured an "educational pact", but such a hope is now as distant as it had been. Serious allegations have been levelled at her and Xisca Ramis, and where the unions are concerned they are allegations symptomatic of a rogue ministry.

It's A Scandal

Here's a strange old thing. A Palma councillor has become embroiled in a scandal whereby he has allegedly used 50 grands' worth of council money as payment for visits to bars and clubs - not any bar or club, these are gay venues. Sounds like a lot of money, you might think, and it is. I suppose it's not too difficult to figure out what some of the money may have been spent on.

The press is lapping it up, so to speak. Had the money gone on the attractions of girlie bars, the scandal would, I suggest, still very much be a scandal, though it might have received more of an "oh, he's a bit of a lad" reaction. Today the front page of "Ultima Hora" has a grainy photo taken by a mobile, which apparently shows Rodrigo de Santos, under a headline bearing the words "orgies" and "drugs". It's all the gift of the Gods for the media. The trousering or rather untrousering of the council's moolah seems almost irrelevant now as gay sex, rent boys and drugs all come to prominence.

There are aspects of Mallorcan life of which I am largely unaware. I knew that there were gay bars in Palma, but that's all I knew; thanks to the reporting I could now tell you where you could go and receive favours in return for cash, either one's own or a town hall's, but I won't. Mallorca, the Mallorca of Alcúdia and Pollensa, does not have a gay scene. The scene, which is low-key compared to Ibiza, is centred on Palma pretty much alone. Apart from something of a gay bit of beach in Playa de Muro, the north is gay-lite. A few years ago, I was told about a lesbian couple who would get a bit too friendly at some apartments in Puerto Alcúdia and in front of the children. The apartments are no longer for holiday rental, and the person who told me, disapprovingly of this, was himself gay. It is not something one could otherwise imagine witnessing on an everyday basis here.

However, Mallorca, and Spain, have a relaxed attitude towards homosexuality, or at least that is how it appears. The new maturity of the country's politics, echoed in the PSOE's recent election win, demonstrates that the populace can accept liberal policies such as those on same-sex marriages. Spain has been dubbed a "Nordic" country in the Mediterranean for this very reason, and this in a country of the macho and the Catholic Church, albeit that the latter has a diminishing influence. The scandal, and the prurience that it inspires, is not a reflection of attitude, it is a reflection of the media knowing a good story when they can sell newspapers. It would be the same in Britain; actually it would probably be a lot more sensationalist. That the councillor may have frequented gay clubs is of course part of the "shock" value of the story. But it should not overlook the fact of pocketing a sizable wedge of public money. What he did with it is, in some ways, beside the point.


QUIZ
Yesterday - The Hollies. Today's title - it was one of those songs that along with which duo revived whose career?

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