Wasted resources - Government still wasting millions

THE frustrating lack of joined-up thinking in government policy is graphically illustrated by the bizarre case of a €7m library that lies idle because of a cap on staff recruitment.

The long-awaited facility for the leafy village of Malahide, in the heart of an area where the population has exploded by 22%, was expected to open earlier this year. But the celebrations have been put on ice, because of conflicting coalition priorities.

It defies credulity that the millennium budget project, funded by a Department of Environment grant of €4.6m, and topped up with local authority funding of €2.4m, should remain closed, because the Department of Finance imposed an embargo on the recruitment of new staff.

In similar instances of botched planning, a CT scanner at Louth County Hospital in Dundalk lay idle for months, in a laundry at the hospital, while a €48m health centre in Ballymun was idle for three years, because it was built without Department of Health approval.

This sort of bungling one might expect in a banana republic, not in one of Europe’s richest nations.