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| Taoiseach Brian Cowen with President Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, March 17, 2009. |
There is surely evidence a-plenty that the term "Irish reform," is an oxymoron and the grim change in economic circumstances has had little impact.
Google "Irish+reform" and the Irish Reform Act 1832 heads the results listing followed by pages linking to stories on "Irish reform schools," - - hardly symbols of progressivism.
It's appropriate that a nineteenth century British Act of Parliament should head the ranking and in 1986, the late UCD constitutional law professor and Fine Gael TD, John M. Kelly, said: "Ireland's political and official rulers have largely behaved like a crew of maintenance engineers, just keeping a lot of old British structures and plant ticking over... The challenge is to evolve structures - - within which the people can be drawn to individual and community responsibility for their own development."
On last St. Patrick's Day in the White House, Taoiseach Brian Cowen translated the Obama campaign slogan, "Yes we can," as "Is féidir linn."
This week, Cowen showed himself to nobody's surprise, as the scion of Irish dyed-in-the-wool conservatism, when he told the Dáil, that public servants, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, were being forced to spend an inordinate amount of time "trawling through" files, when they could be doing other work.
He must have had a passing thought of pre-computer days in Tullamore, as a small-town solicitor, wading through dog-eared paperwork.
"It is an expensive and time-consuming aspect of Government work," he said.
Trawling through files! - - after spending/wasting billions of euros on IT systems and e-Governments projects.
It conjures up an image of the clerk with the quill, working at a high desk, in the East India Company.
Why can the US state of Missouri, with a population of 5.5m, put all its public spending online - - even the pay of highway patrol troopers - - at a cost of less than $200,000?
Last month, the Taoiseach announced that the Government would appoint a CIO who would report to him and have responsibility for all IT projects in the public sector.
Seems like a good idea but wonder why something so obvious would take so long and exactly 4 years after Cowen himself was involved in signing off on new rules on major public projects - - only after a public outcry on huge cost overruns on road and public IT projects.
There has been a litany of waste and while a US website for providing public information on federal contracts can cost $1m, $50m is spent in Ireland on a public services portal and it’s just junked.
Science Foundation Ireland, responsible for innovation, spends €400K on an IT system and it’s just junked.
In Oct 2005, Finfacts commented: “The penny has at last dropped for the computer illiterate Government Ministers, senior bureaucrats and political advisers who have been paid well, to ask the questions that a business person would be expected to, when signing off on major expenditures….Instead of putting party flunkeys on the public payroll, has there been anyone in government with the savvy to propose a CIO - Chief Information Officer - with key experience in world class IT organisations and successful project implementation experience? A similar function with responsibility for major infrastructure projects would surely have also been merited.”
Brian Cowen will never wonder is there a better way than the current culture of Victorian secrecy and inadequate accounting/control systems?
The Bord Snip group under the chairmanship of UCD economist, Colm McCarthy, was established because the Department of Finance did not have access to detailed cross-departmental spending, by category.
Brian Cowen is in good company with fellow conservatives in Fine Gael and the Labour Party.
The Fine Gael Leader Enda Kenny intermittently speaks of reform and Labour Party leader Eamonn Gilmore, even less.
The recently elected Fine Gael TD, economist George Lee, who is not currently restricted by a Front Bench portfolio, has had nothing to say on the issue and most members of the Oireachtas, have nothing to say on most issues of national importance.
As we have said before, Irish society is deeply conservative with the main role of politicians as arbiters of entrenched self-serving vested interests.
During the heyday of the social partnership process, when both IBEC, the main business group, and ICTU, the trade union congress, had open hotlines to the Department of the Taoiseach, neither of them pushed for reform as each side had vested interests to protect.
Narrow self-interest was the focus, not the common interest.
Beyond the jigsaw parts of the conservative establishment, the issue of process appears to be boring for much of the media when reporting on personality issues seems more exciting.
Earlier this month, the Paris-based government think-tank, the OECD,put forward reform proposals to avoid a repetition of the Celtic Tiger crash (pdf document).
The proposals covered macro-prudential risk, public sector reform and ending protections for private sector professional services cartels.
In April 2008, the OECD proposed a culling of the estimated 800 State agencies/ quangos.
A "taskforce" has been reviewing the proposals in the interval.
A metaphorical bomb should be put under it.
As my mother would have said, "it would make a dog strike his father!"
If change does not come now after a momentous crash, what would induce an urgency for it?
Some wealthy snake oil salesman, flogging the Promised Land to a beaten people?
The three big public sector reforms in the past decade, were: 1) the Tammany Hall-style lucky-dip public decentralisation "plan" for moving half the public service to remote seaside hamlets such as Cahirciveen and Clonakilty - - coincidentally then the home locations of ministers; 2) the replacement of health boards with a centralised bloated bureaucracy called the Health Service Executive, run by an academic with no management experience, who was appointed by a politician who in her adult working life, outside politics, spent 9 months as a teacher; 3) the "Better Local Government" programme, which provided for the expansion of management positions with fancy titles such as "director of services," which may have sounded "better" than "inspector of drains" or "master of the stool" but the 1898 British template remained essentially intact.
So the system of limited accountability, where the buck appears to stop nowhere, remains unchanged, with no evidence from the political class, of serious interest in changing the status quo. As for the collateral damage of the endemic misgovernance - - the tens of thousands of unemployed, living in a shadow world that is alien to wealthy trade union leaders - - some words that Queen Marie Antoinette of France may or may not have said, come to mind.
