They spend billions on our behalf, but do we care where it’s going?

I GOT the usual strong reaction to the piece I wrote last week about the cost of a new prison.

Bloody liberals, some of you muttered, you’re all the bloody same. Just trying to hype up the cost of keeping people in jail because you’d rather see them roaming the streets.

One caller to a radio programme that followed up on the piece said he knew the way to keep prison costs down. Bring back the chain gangs.

I’m glad to say that only a small number of you seem to feel that way. But (and no disrespect is intended here) most of you who reacted to the piece missed the point just a little bit.

I wasn’t arguing for or against prisons as such. Yes, I believe we should see prison as a last resort, and the fact that keeping someone in jail is so expensive simply reinforces that view.

And I also believe the proposed new prison is being built in the wrong place for the wrong reasons.

But my bigger point is about our right to know, and our right to be involved in the decision-making, at least to some extent. The prison is a project that will cost a billion euro to run over the course of a decade — but it’s not the only one. Extraordinary, unimaginable amounts of money are spent every day on our behalf by people we elected. The amounts have got so big that they’re almost impossible to grasp. So we’ve stopped trying — and that’s a recipe for disaster.

When I started working for a government in the 1980s, the annual size of the current budget deficit was debated. Endlessly, everywhere.

People knew the consequences of one figure or another, and very often knew the detail of the row going on in the cabinet about which figure it should be. Of course, in a time of difficulty and retrenchment, the size of the projected deficit determined the size of the cuts that would have to be made in spending.

So the deficit wasn’t a mere economic concept — it affected people’s lives in real or immediate ways.

The figures were smaller, too, and more manageable in terms of understanding and communicating them. Even as recently as the 1980s you could build 100 houses for a million pounds.

But none of us has a clue now. The figures are so big and so remote that somehow it seems not to matter any more.

And of course, cutbacks are a thing of the past anyway. We don’t need to worry.

Well, fecklessness about figures got us into a lot of trouble in the first place. The budgetary miscalculations and the wild spending decisions of the late 1970s contributed to 15 years of real hardship. And as sure as eggs, the one way for ministers to start making those kind of mistakes again is for the rest of us to lose interest in what’s going on. Especially in the year before an election.

With billions in the kitty, and an electorate weary of calculating what it all means, the temptation to start throwing money around will be huge.

I don’t object to extra money going towards the right things — provided it’s properly managed and fairly distributed. I don’t want to see long-term commitments being made about short-term problems, or money being spent for no reason other than that it’s being spent in a marginal constituency.

What worries me — and as I said, I think the prisons argument is only one example — is that we seem to have lost interest in our right to know what’s going on.

If I stopped 100 of you in the street and offered you €1,000 if you could write down — let’s say to the nearest €100 million — how much our Government intends to spend on our behalf this year, not one of you would win it. That’s partly because the figure has become so huge we’ve all lost our ability to understand it. But it’s also because we’ve stopped caring about it.

Here’s what the actual figures are, and you’ll see what I mean. They propose to spend €43,875,637,000 on current services this year — that’s running the country on a day-to-day basis. And then on top of that they intend to spend a further €6,767,238,000 on capital projects. That’s a total of €50,642,875,000.

WHEN you see it written down that way, it’s a bit alarming, isn’t it? You begin to wonder what kind of genius is needed to manage all that, make sure it doesn’t go astray, and guarantee that it’s all spent wisely and well.

Because here’s the other thing to remember. Three quarters of all of that comes from you. Income tax, VAT and excise taxes — the direct and indirect taxes you pay contribute the lion’s share of what’s spent.

You don’t have to begrudge that, just insist that it’s spent wisely!

But instead, we’re never really told what the figures are in ways we can get our heads around. You might have read somewhere, or been told in some fashion, that expenditure this year would exceed €50 billion for the first time.

But even a phrase like €50 billion sounds a bit meaningless compared with the rather frightening figure of €50,642,875,000, doesn’t it? During the quiet weeks of the summer, I intend to look in a bit of detail at where all this money goes. Because a few things strike me as being obvious. First of all, by the time the next election comes, our Government will have been in office 10 years, give or take.

That means that in current terms they will have spent, over the years they have been there, more than €500 billion — or €500,000,000,000 if you like — on providing the economic and social services, the security and governance, and the infrastructural development we have needed.

On the one hand, it’s perhaps not surprising they can claim (as they do) to have achieved so much, given that astonishing amount of spending in a decade. On the other, why does there still seem so much to do?

And secondly, we know there has been some wasted money. Electronic voting, health service computer systems, a number of other mismanaged projects. Taken all together, they might have cost us, that we know of, €500 million. A vast amount of money to be sure, but as a total of all spending over the decade it’s around one-tenth of one per cent.

You know what that means? No, it almost certainly doesn’t mean the Government has been unfairly criticised for waste. It means there’s a huge amount more to be uncovered because the truth is we don’t know the half of what has gone on.

Knowing what goes on with our money, how it’s managed and spent, and being entitled to assume that someone is accountable for it all — they are democratic rights. We know that our right to accountability hasn’t been exercised very much, if at all. But you know what? We don’t just have a right to know, we also have a duty to care. And if that disappears, then we’re all in trouble.