There’s never a cent wasted if you just apply the Lowry Logic

IT is not generally appreciated how genuinely talented is Tipperary TD Michael Lowry. This man is more than just a survivor.

He is a dab hand at hanging on to the loyalty of his voters. He also knows how to work the parliamentary system.

Working the system starts with asking Dáil questions of all government departments, thus ensuring his research is a) comprehensive, b) thorough, c) accurate.

His most recent joint venture (joint in the sense of him asking the questions and a rake of civil servants digging up the answers) was particularly effective.

It revealed that government departments gave money back to the Department of Finance. (It’s OK to slap the back of your hand to your forehead at this point and do a shuddering in-drawn breath.) Government departments, at a time when they’re all complaining that they don’t have enough money, took some of what they had been given and stuffed it into the back pockets of those guys over in finance.

Having found out this grim fact, Mr Lowry knew how to get media coverage for it, by starting with the description of it as “absolutely shocking” and moving on to a quotation like the following.

“Hospital beds lay empty, hospital waiting lists continue, accident and emergency is in crisis,” he says. (I think he means hospital beds LIE empty, but maybe they just practiced for a while and don’t do it any more.) “Greenfield sites await school buildings,” he goes on, “community employment scheme participant numbers have been halved, government broadband rollout is slower than the Pony Express, traffic gridlock could have been almost eliminated.”

It’s a bit confusing, the way he puts it, but you get the drift. The clincher, as he sees it, is that the €150 million sitting, unspent, in the Department of Health would have covered the entire costs of the accident & emergency 10-point plan unveiled last year. (And beginning to work, this year, he could add, but doesn’t, him being an opposition TD.) Lowry Logic, it is fair to deduce, means that every Government department should arrive at the end of its financial year with its last cent not just accounted for, but spent.

The secretaries-general should be lined up at that point with the lining of their pockets pulled out the way characters in children’s books are pictured, to indicate that they have not a penny left. Instead, we have these miserable money-retentive departmental apparatchiks filling money-boxes on the sly with money they then slip to the Department of Finance who, no doubt, go off and buy BMWs for themselves with it.

Where would we be if we hadn’t Michael Lowry to fearlessly expose this most golden of golden circles?

Now, Michael, come over here till I tell you something. Let’s say a government department wants to buy something. Like mobile phones. Not mobile phones? OK, let’s pick something more neutral and workaday. Like screws. Steel screws. The department know they’re going to need 6,000 screws next year.

Not only that, but next year they’re also going to need a skilled person with a screwdriver to insert those screws.

Can I let you in on a secret? The department then has to do an amazing amount of paperwork authorising screws, screw-driver and screw-inserter.

They contact appropriate tenderers and run them through a system which not only selects based on screwing skill and track record, but also establishes that the screw-inserters have a tax clearance certificate indicating a warm relationship with the Revenue, which you will agree, Michael, is an important aspect of accountability and transparency and all that good stuff.

HAVING checked through the paperwork, the department is ready to spend money. Money beaten out of the Department of Finance. It is important to state, since you seem to have missed it, that the officials in any other department would rather eat boiled budgies, fully feathered, than give any money back to Finance. You know the way the opposition hate the Government, Michael? Well, it is as nothing compared to the way the other Government departments hate the Department of Finance. Mention the D of F and their hands automatically curl into the anti-vampire gesture. Or a worse gesture.

So each department, once it has the readies, has a real and present urge to SPEND the readies. But, Michael, you know a lot more about accounting, creative and uncreative, than I do. Not to mention planning. So you’ll be aware of the things that can go wrong in both areas. Let’s imagine, just to keep it simple, that the 6,000 screws are due to be used in the glorious new children’s hospital Mary Harney plans to build on a greenfield site instead of the cramped quarters in Crumlin where Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children currently sits.

If the first spade going into the ground where that new hospital is going to be built reveals that Mary’s greenfield site is the home of the lesser sleazeball or some similar endangered species, the building is going to be held back, just a bit. Ditto if the spade rattles off a bit of Neanderthal backyard decking.

Of course, you might suggest that when the lesser sleazeball interferes with Mary’s progress, she should grab the money set aside for the hospital and use it to hire 1,000 speech therapists for children with learning disabilities. I’d be right behind you, there, Michael. Except you know what? Even if Mary set traps by the side of every motorway, she wouldn’t catch enough speech therapists to even half-fill a punnet. But it might take a few months before the sorry state of speech-therapist catchment became clear. So the end of her financial year might see her with neither screws nor speech therapists. Ergo, clutching unspent money.

The good news is that she gets to keep the money, these days, and use it next year. The outrage you express is historic.

You’ve taken eight years in the past, added up all the Government departments which handed back money during that period, ignored the fact that precisely the same happened during your time as a minister, and ignored, too, the fact that the current administration evened out the national finances to allow multi-annual planning, thereby improving a system you didn’t - correct me if I’m wrong - improve much when you were part of it.

And a word here for the Department of Finance guys, those heartless big brainers whose blood runs as cold as if refrigerated by that company you used to run, Michael. You see, they have to keep little stashes of cash around to cover Government ventures like, say, tribunals. Tribunals that soak up money to reveal interesting things about lads like yourself, Michael.

And you know another thing they need to keep money around for? Answering parliamentary questions. In every department of which you asked this money question, several reasonably paid civil servants had to dig out and double-check tons of data. That costs a lot of money, Michael.

For a wee bit of pre-holiday publicity for your good self.

Well-spent, you say? If you apply Lowry Logic, indubitably.