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Mystery surrounds identity of Irish government for last 10 years
Read more about: Fianna Fail, Government
Here is the five page executive summary of the report of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development looking at the management of the public service in Ireland. Once you wade past the quasi-diplomacy on the first page and a half, it’s a damning indictment of how the public service has been run, albeit one buried in public management lingo. The report is too polite to state the one huge implicit question: what was going on in government for the last 10 years?
The key conceptual device of the report is to distinguish “civil service” — the stereotypical administrative functions performed in the core government departments — from the broader “public service” — the civil service plus a panoply of state agencies and authorities with whom the members of the public usually deal when they need something done. Bertie Ahern has expressed astonishment that there are apparently 800 of the latter agencies. And the main theme of the report is a lack of public service integration, both between the civil service and the agencies, and among the agencies themselves. A few phrases from the report –
segmented … sub-optimal coherence … system-wide coherence .. fragmentation and disconnects … performance measures need to look at outcomes rather than inputs or processes … renewed emphasis on the role of ICT and e-government … few opportunities for generalist staff
Among the ironies: the country that has a global reputation for having built its boom on information technology is way behind in its own use of IT. And many of the reforms that are called for in the report are the kind of thing that benchmarking was already supposed to have delivered. Not showing much humility, here is what Brian Cowen had to say –
But there is a limit to the level of criticism that I will accept of the thousands of dedicated and hard working civil servants, health care workers, teachers, local authority workers, Gardaí and others who contribute to the delivery of our public services.
Note how criticism of the government’s running of the public service is converted, by Cowen, into criticism of the frontline workers — an identical tactic to that used by George Bush when his management of the Iraq war is criticised. In addition, Cowen didn’t exactly sound raring to go –
The Review provides much food for thought for me and my colleagues. Some recommendations I can sign up to straight away; some will require further reflection; some may ultimately prove to be unsuitable to Irish circumstances. I am determined to take decisive action to improve Irish public services and look forward to working with the social partners to achieve this. I intend that when I am Taoiseach, I and my successor as Minister for Finance will set out our more detailed response to the Review.
Unfortunately, the summary of the report does not cover what could be its most concrete consequence — a negative evaluation of the “decentralisation” program, which could provide Cowen an opportunity to kill or scale back one of the worst of the McCreevy legacies.
But what are the prospects for broader reform? Bertie’s horror at the existence of 800 public agencies did not come with any regret at the number of appointments that they facilitated. I remember once talking to an understandably disillusioned FG veteran who complained that the public and media didn’t understand the role that the authorities and agencies played in building the FF base: 800 agencies = thousands of appointments over the lifetime of a government = a lot of potentially influential people happy with the way things are.
So good luck to the OECD team. Let’s hope their report doesn’t head straight to the shelf.
Fine Gael have produced proposals in the area of reducing the number of government agencies and making them work better a few weeks ago. In their report more than 400 agencies were identified, of which more than 200 had been created by the current government since 1997.
But sure, the media will ignore the positive suggestions FG have made in this area, and will instead allow the likes of Cowen and Ahern free reign to go on about reforming the whole area and ignore the fact that they have been responsible for the current situation.
http://www.finegael.ie/campaign/index.cfm/type/details/nkey/103/pkey/0
We didn’t need the OECD to tell us that our public service is in many ways in poor shape. The big problems were well known - the dramatic outsourcing of executive functions to agencies, the lack of accountability in this move owing to inadequate control mechansims, and the political nature of how senior appointsments are made. In fact, the think-tank TASC made a study of this very phenomenon a couple of years ago and charted in detail the dramatic leap in government agencies. Nevertheless, the nod from the OECD on this issue is welcome. It adds another gram of momentum to the argument for change.
It is true that our whole public service, outsourcing aside, needs big reform in many areas. From Health to County councils. The latter point draws us into another area that needs reform: the whole edifice of our democracy needs to be adjusted to face the task of delivering effective government in the 21st century. The Dail has become almost redundant. The Senate is an anachromism and with its 11 appointed seats, it’s simply rubber stamping office for the executive. Several reports and ideas on both of these areas have been put forward by opposition parties in the last decade or so. All were ignored. John Gormely has at least taken on the task of opening up the debate on local government. You can be under no illusion about the need for local government reform if you saw the prime time program last autumn which described how county councils around the country are drawn from and lackies of the construction industry.
Some commentators (such as Benjamin Freidman in “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth”) argue that an economic boom is the time to reform. In a time of hardship people close ranks, fear change, blame others for their predicament, and often drift to the extremes. When times are good, however, people are more willing to give up a little, to surrender entrenched positions, to embrace change without fear. Resources are available to oil the cogs of reform.
The failure to use our boom to steer through significant reform of our democracy and our public service was the greatest single failure of the Ahern years and will forever lie as an ugly blemish on his record.
It was interesting to listen to the Bert, in The USA, read the notes prepared by his back room PR gurus .
All that guff about Northern Ireland, as though the only event of note in the past twenty years was the various photo opportunities that were orchestrated to show what a wonderful chap he is - all smiles as he shakes hands with various NI dignitaries, as though he, single-handedly, achieved the breakthrough.
And then, to compound the fictional fairytale, Brian Dobson interviews, of all people, Senator Morrison - of Green Card infamy - who banged on about how he fixed for IRA Supremo Adams to get a Visa to fundraise, in the USA,for the purchase of AK47’s; Glock pistols etc. (now being used, daily, by the Crime bosses in Ireland)
I realise that RTE is controlled by left wing fanatics in cahoots with Fianna Fail, but what about the License Payers?
Have we not a right to the truth about this Charlatan?
He has resigned and should never have been allowed go to the USA.
He is part of Ireland’s less illustrious recent history and should be quietly buried, with the IRA weaponry that the Limerick IRA Criminal Mafia have agreed to have “Decommissioned”.