Report: Cabinet ignored stern spending warnings
Canadian public service expert Rob Wright said finance ministers Charlie McCreevy and Brian Cowen brought the department’s recommendations to Cabinet, but each year these went unheeded.
Mr Wright’s independent review panel report on Strengthening the Capacity of the Department of Finance was finally published by Minister Brian Lenihan yesterday.
It said stern spending warnings were “consistently exceeded”, particularly ahead of the 2002 and 2007 general elections. And it said Ireland was now in a worse economic state because the department was not listened to. “Had departmental and ministerial advice to Cabinet at the start of the budgetary cycle been accepted and sustained, Ireland would have been better positioned to deal with the current economic challenges,” it said.
The panel’s report said the department provided “clear advice to Cabinet” on curtailing spending but this was forgotten in budget speeches which “essentially paid the bills” for successive programmes for government and social partnership deals.
However, the panel said the department should have changed the tone and urgency of its messages to get its point across.
Reacting to the report, Fine Gael and the Labour Party said the mistakes of previous programmes for government would not be repeated in this week’s negotiations.
Neither would explicitly commit to addressing the criticism in the report that programmes for government lacked “full economic and fiscal analysis” by the department.
