Selling off state assets would be the height of national folly

HE’S a cute fellow, that Colm McCarthy.

Plausible, calm, measured.

Never gets too worked up or flustered under questioning. Always seems to know the right answer to any question he’s asked, even if he sometimes manages to convey the impression that the questioner is a bit thick.

And there’s two other things about him. He’s as honest as the day is long — never tells anything but the truth as he sees it. He’s modest too. You won’t find him charging the kind of fees we’re used to seeing nowadays for any sort of consultancy support. When he published his last report — the so-called Bord Snip Nua document — he charged a fee of around €30,000. He’s clearly a guy who’d rather be taken seriously than earn a fast buck. Solicitors and accountants all over Dublin sniggered at the naivety of it.

Honest, modest, cool, serious.

In short, highly dangerous.

Because the one impression he does manage to create that is totally wrong is the sense that he has no axe to grind. The truth is he does have an axe to grind. And his very modesty and down-to-earth hardchaw Dub truthfulness hides a skilled propagandist with a mission.

He’s also an agent. He’s not producing these reports for the good of his health. His reports are commissioned by the Department of Finance, staffed and resourced by the Department of Finance, and published by the Department of Finance. He may be taking cool and careful aim, but it’s the department that supplies both the gun and the bullets. The one guy who will never be commissioned to write a report into the Department of Finance itself is the same Colm McCarthy. He’d be just too conflicted.

That’s not to say, of course, that his views don’t have validity. But there is a certain, shall we say, sameness about them. Last year he examined a range of state-sponsored bodies, and his prescription was simple. Close them all down. This year he’s had a good look at a wide range of commercial semi-state bodies, and again his prescription is easy enough to follow. Sell them all off.

There’s always a bit of a problem selling blunderbuss measures like this — it would remind you a bit of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. “The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small,” according to Lewis Carroll. “’Off with his head!’ she said, without even looking round.”

(Actually, and here’s a really odd thing. If you look up the original John Tenniel drawings for Alice in Wonderland on the web, and they’re easy to find, there’s a remarkable resemblance between the Queen of Hearts and the bold Dr McCarthy. Especially as she sits there on her throne, looking spectacularly grumpy, surrounded by subjects who live in fear of her)

Of course, if you keep saying the same thing, like the Queen of Hearts, you run the risk of not being taken as seriously as you might like (the King of Hearts used to promptly pardon everyone sentenced to death by the Queen). So you have to employ some of the techniques of the propagandist. One of the most popular and effective of these, of course, is the technique of labelling.

When the Bord Snip Nua report was published, all the state-sponsored bodies to which it referred were lumped together under a really effective label. The term “quango” became instantly popular.

Think of a quango, and it reminds you of a dodo. Oddly enough, the dodo was another Lewis Carroll invention, but also a real-life species of bird. The dodo was a bird that couldn’t fly. In fact it was pretty useless all round. Its meat tasted awful, and it was no oil painting to look at. And as a result of all that the dodo is extinct. The last remaining use of the dodo in the English language, in fact, is in the phrase “as dead as a dodo”. The modern equivalent could well be “as useless as a quango”.

It’s harder to apply the same kind of labelling to commercial semi-state bodies. They’re quite clearly far from extinct. Quite a few of them are profitable. More than a few are well and efficiently run.

They frequently do something that is quite unique to their sector — they combine productive and efficient outcomes with social purposes.

They are, often, the State’s contribution to wealth creation, as well as the State’s way of getting things done that wouldn’t otherwise be done.

Now, there is a demand to see them privatised, and Colm McCarthy has been brought in to tell us how it should be done. Without any public debate, it seems, we’ve already passed the point of whether it should be done. It’s now about when, and how much we should be looking for.

But of course even that is likely to be controversial. There are a few of us left, after all, who remember that public enterprise built this country when no-one else would. And there are lots of things to be valued about public enterprise that could well not survive in an era of wholesale privatisation.

That’s why the first thing we’re invited to read about is the salaries paid to the chief executives of semi-state companies. It’s another way of giving them a bad name.

OF course, many of these salaries are entirely indefensible, even obscene. When you look at the lists, the first thing you realise is that our semi-states aren’t run by foreign hot-shots, bought in at enormous prices because that was the only way to get them. They’re run, in the main, by Irish managers, many of whom have worked their way up through the ranks. So the huge salaries and outrageous benefits are all home-grown.

They’re all based on a spurious benchmarking exercise, where things like turnover were compared to international and private sector comparisons. Somewhere along the line, the notion of public service was replaced by a feeling that “we deserve to be fat cats too”. There was a time when public sector managers in Ireland took pride in the fact that they were breaking new ground, and that they were in the vanguard in equipping our country to take its place in the world. How and when, I wonder, did that feeling get replaced by the desire for a bigger company car than the other guy? But here’s the thing. There is actually no link between the salaries paid to the managers and the importance of public enterprise to our country. Yes, we should be angry at the feather-bedding that has taken place in recent years, and we should be demanding that our politicians should fix that. If there are public servants who only want to work for fat salaries, let them emigrate.

But don’t fall into the trap. Separate the salaries of the top brass from the issue of public enterprise. We need to think long and hard before we go down this road. Selling the best of what we have, right at the moment we need to be driving it harder for all our sakes, would be the height of national folly.