Who funded the big names and small achievements?

YOUR editorial (September 16) gave unqualified approval to what you called an “inflammatory, radical or even subversive” speech in relation to the public service made by Minister of State for Trade and Commerce, John McGuinness, recently.

Whatever epithet your editorial wants to apply to the speech, it had one glaring characteristic — and that was its hypocrisy.

Firstly, Mr McGuinness is a member of a government party which has presided over the allocation of billions of taxpayers’ money for most of the last 20 years. Yet he made the extraordinary claim that the public service is “above political control”.

He then deplored the fact that “the public service continues to employ more and more people” and declared himself “tired of committees with big names and small achievements”.

He also bemoaned the fact that “far too much power had been handed to virtually unaccountable bodies of one sort or another”.

In fact, he himself cannot be absolved from the charge of being one of the “big names with small achievements”.

He has responsibility for the situation since he and members of his party voted the finance bills through the Dáil year after year to set up and to fund all these so-called unaccountable bodies and to “employ more and more people”.

It is, therefore, a bit late and very hypocritical for him to be telling us now that these bodies should not have been set up and the people who staff them should not have been employed.

The question also has to be asked as to why Mr McGuinness was allowed to get away, unchallenged by your editorial, with this hypocrisy?

Anyway, all of this seems to fly in the face of the fact that the Irish public service spends a lower proportion of GDP than the public service in most other developed countries.

As far as Mr McGuinness and your editorial are concerned, however, never let the truth get in the way of a good rant.

Anthony Leavy

Shielmartin Drive

Sutton

Dublin 13