State board membership on the basis of what, not who, you know

IN the middle of the outrage about the appointment of Celia Larkin to a “cushy job” (which is neither a job nor cushy, but we’ll come to that) someone came up with the ultimate indictment of the state board to which she’d been appointed:

It was going to have two hairdressers on it.

Top up the Valium, quick, lads. Else how will we cope with the possibility of a state board with two hairdressers present? Two plumbers, two actuaries or two electronics engineers wouldn’t create headlines. State boards, for decades, have had multiples of lawyers, doctors, company directors and accountants on them. But nobody thinks two bean-counters in the same boardroom would unbalance the discourse or endanger the entity. It’s unclear what precise threat would be presented by two hairdressers on a board, but we’re in no immediate danger of finding out, since Celia Larkin, while she may own a beauty consultancy, isn’t actually a hairdresser at all. So there’s only one of them. Whew, the relief.

The splendid Trevor Sarjent, addressing the consumer watchdog appointment, wasted no time on hairdressers, whether paired or in single file. Instead, he sensibly stated that you shouldn’t be selected on the basis of who you know, but on the basis of what you know, and that the selectors shouldn’t be politicians of any hue, but a Public Appointments Commission.

Now, if they get lucky at the next general election, Fine Gael and Labour will be hoping that the Greens will line up beside them to form a Government. In that eventuality, it will be interesting to see how amenable FG/Lab are to abandoning their right, as incoming Government, to appoint people to state boards.

My guess is that they’d be so far from amenable that Trevor would have to run Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte down with his bicycle and beat them with his wooden briefcase to get them to agree to it. Planting the like-minded on prestigious state boards is one of the most prized perks of politics.

A FG/Labour Government would arrive egging to do a purge and replaced those purged with appointees more likely to favour FG/Lab policies. Would they employ “environmental push factors”? Not a chance. Politicians can be nasty, but not THAT nasty.

When FG/Lab had all the boards tilted the other way, they might at that point consider putting future appointments into the hands of a commission to prevent Fianna Fáil coming back in and tilting them back the way they were, but it wouldn’t be something they’d welcome, any more than Santa Claus would welcome outsourcing the sleigh-and-stocking task.

In the unlikely event that such an appointments commission came about, the first thing they’d have to make clear is that membership of a state board isn’t a job, never mind a cushy job. Some state boards pay a couple of thousand a year for the pleasure of your company at monthly board meetings and for your service on committees and sub-committees. They also pay expenses. A few pay more. But the payment from the majority of state boards is not a salary and doesn’t match what most people could earn if they devoted the same amount of time to a real job.

Having made clear that it’s not a cushy job, the commission would then have to point out that applicants must be willing to study heavy parcels of complicated documentation. Right now, many state board members do not read the documentation sent to them, although this does not make them shamefacedly silent. Bellowing trenchant opinions is so much easier when one is unhampered by data.

Before being considered for state board membership, not only should applicants sign up for reading the homework, but in advance, they should sign up for a training course that hammers home the obligations and elucidates the procedures the board operates. If board members were trained in this way, it would hugely improve the performance of state boards. It might also prevent the constant frustration caused by board members who believe they’ve been appointed to represent only the interests of whatever organisation they come from.

ALL boards should be made up of people who are not media naifs. Media naifs get their highs from being phoned by journalists who know how to do subservient lines to the effect that “I know how important your task is and I wouldn’t for a minute ask you to breach confidentiality, I’d just appreciate it if you, as the expert, would help me make sure the information I already have isn’t wrong.”

More importantly, boards should exclude political gophers. Socialising with politicians isn’t a crime. Working with politicians isn’t actionable.

But taking personal loyalty to a political party or a minister with you when you go to State board meetings is not a good thing. It can take one of two forms. The first is when the board member, overtly or covertly, parrots whatever the minister wants said and fights for whatever the minister wants achieved. The second, even more repellent form of excessive loyalty, can best be described as loo leaking.

Loo leaking is a product of the mobile phone era and is engaged in by board members who nip off to the gents to tell their political master or mistress who is saying what and seek guidance as to what to do next. The return of a loo leaker to a meeting is always interesting, particularly when the leaking apparatchik returns to the board table articulating a line of thought completely the reverse of what he was pushing before he left. Now and again, the loo leaker contacts media on the same lavatorial journey, so the board hears its decisions on radio news bulletins before those decisions have been recorded in the minutes.

An appointments commission, selecting for any board, should seek the intelligent, hard working, ethical and committed. Selecting for a consumer watchdog board, they should, in addition, seek people who understand how national and local government works, with experience in the public and private sector.

Ideally, appointees might have the sort of insight into the vulnerable and how they’re exploited which is given by membership of the VdP or by working at constituency level for a politician in an area with older, poorer and/or ethnically diverse residents. They should know the power of commercial lobbyists and how to steer clear of them. They should be reasonably in touch with reality, in the sense of making and taking their own phone calls, booking their own tickets and driving their own cars. Insulation by personal assistants and chauffeurs can distance people from the real world. Appointment to the board shouldn’t be the high point of their life, but it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.

Even if they have a public profile, their track record should show they can shut up when silence will be more productive than talk.

The commission would find it difficult to find people with all these competences. Difficult - but not impossible.

A few such people are available. A very few. A good appointments commission would quickly find that one of those few is Celia Larkin.