Do-gooders can fill the policy gap left open by our unimaginative state

THIS year our Government is planning to spend around €62 billion. It’s an enormous figure, isn’t it? You’d think there was no problem that couldn’t be solved with that kind of money, and maybe a little more imagination, a bit more serious planning and a lot more better management.

€62bn. It’s hard to imagine. I suspect if you laid it out in, say, €10 notes, it would stretch to the moon. But that’s what it costs to run the health and education systems, the gardaí and the army, to build and maintain the roads and railways and buses, to protect the environment, to care for people who need care and protection.

It comes to a quite staggering €14,263 for every man, woman and child of the population.

Given the amount of money we spend, most people could be forgiven for being surprised that we don’t appear to be doing a better job of it.

When you think about how much there is, there really ought to be no problems at all. With that kind of expenditure, you’d imagine we were all living in a land of milk and honey. And some, of course, are. But a great many people in Ireland live a long way from milk and honey, despite the resources that are available.

I could fill several columns with the reasons for that, but maybe one thing leaps off the page already. Money may not be enough. The additional elements of imagination, planning, and good management are surely essential ingredients if all those resources are to be put to the best possible use.

This may be where what they call in America “the third way” has a role to play. By a curious coincidence, Americans gave away last year almost exactly three times our entire national budget. Charitable giving in the US last year equalled €186bn, or $275bn. That figure represents 2% of America’s national wealth.

Now, of course, Irish people give a huge amount of money to people less fortunate than themselves, and to causes that move us. When Live Aid sought to address the Ethiopian famine, or when a tsunami devastated thousands of lives in Asia, Irish contributions, pound for pound, were among the highest in the world.

But we tend to give spontaneously, sometimes emotionally. Very often we give without the faintest idea of what’s happening to the money, how it’s being used or accounted for, whether it’s being used in the right way. Sometimes we give and then wonder afterwards if the money produced the results we hoped for.

Americans, on the other hand, give systematically and they expect the money they give to produce real and tangible results that are properly accounted for. There are more then 60,000 philanthropic foundations in the US, and the money they distribute researches cures for disease, promotes the arts and supports artists and helps to educate tens of thousands of young Americans. Private, charitable money in this way helps to run an awful lot of things, from museums to playgrounds.

These figures were produced the other day by the US ambassador to Ireland, Thomas Foley. He was hosting a discussion on philanthropy in his residence, and he had invited a number of experts in the field of philanthropy to come over to Ireland to discuss the subject with interested Irish people.

Ambassadors sometimes have a tough job. They can spend an awful lot of time defending unpopular foreign policy decisions in their host countries and they seldom enough get opportunities to take initiatives about things in which they are personally interested.

But Ambassador Foley is interested in philanthropy, and wants to see a public policy developed here that supports it.

Although he’s be much too polite and diplomatic to say so, I suspect that’s in part because he sees a lot of gaps here in Ireland that aren’t being filled by public policy. Philanthropy, properly organised and structured, offers a new and different way of supporting quality and innovation and producing extra value for social policy initiatives.

I don’t believe that anything to which people ought to be entitled as of right should ever be dependent on charity. If you have a right to an education, or to top-quality healthcare when you need it, those rights should never depend on the ability of the school or hospital to raise money from philanthropic donors.

One of the differences between us and the US lies in that fundamental difference in philosophy — we believe in the role of the State essentially because we believe there are some things that only the community as a whole should be involved in delivering and managing.

Some of the consequences of privatisation in Ireland would tend to copperfasten people in that belief.

But if there’s one thing the last few years have taught us, it is that the State’s capacity to plan and manage is limited. And the lack of imagination in public policy development is positively frightening. A bureaucratic and cumbersome State, for instance, will always fail to deal imaginatively and sensitively with the needs of people with cystic fibrosis or autism.

In the US, however, a number of philanthropic foundations are pouring millions into researching both conditions — not just into cures but into different forms of treatment, maintenance, education and development.

Where there is enormous scope for development in Ireland is in a real sense of partnership between private wealth and public policy.

I would love to see a structure developed that would be capable of attracting private money on a sustained and systematic basis into, for instance, the task of eliminating child poverty or building happier and more sustainable communities.

IRISH people like Niall Mellon are achieving amazing results in the South African townships by tapping into that willingness to give, and by doing it systematically and to a plan. Why can’t we do that at home, too? To attract more private money into public policy areas, and to do it right, will involve a lot of public policy changes — and not all of them will be easy.

Tax incentives, for instance, could be controversial if they’re seen as just another tax shelter. But it would be just as undesirable if a government were to succeed in encouraging people to give back some of the proceeds of the Celtic Tiger and then immediately start cutting public spending itself.

A policy to attract more philanthropy in the Irish context can only work if it is clearly seen as something that adds value to the efforts of the community, and not a means for substituting public money with private money.

At the end of the symposium the other day, everyone present acknowledged that Ambassador Foley had started a valuable public debate, and he deserved thanks for that. Like all public debates, it will have its pros and cons.

But there are things happening around the world now that wouldn’t be happening at all if it was left to governments or to private enterprise. It’s time we took a long hard look, and with an open mind, at the third way of doing things.