Public sector failure - Culture of rewarding ineptness

The Government’s appointment of the outgoing secretary general of the Department of Finance, Kevin Cardiff, to the European Court of Auditors raises a number of questions.

The former chief accountant of the European Commission, Marta Andreasen MEP, stated yesterday that the nomination of Mr Cardiff should be withdrawn in view of the debacle over the recently disclosed error that led to the national debt being overestimated by €3.6bn.

The national debt was not only overstated by €3.6bn due to an accounting error, but this was compounded by the failure to take action to rectify the situation after the National Treasury Management Agency notified the Department of Finance of the error in August 2010, and on two or three subsequent occasions.

The whole saga only came to public attention as a result of two officials talking loosely in the bar of a Dublin hotel. The story of such a big mistake should have been released to the public without delay. Everybody is fallible, and it is understandable that people make mistakes, but ignoring those errors, or covering them up, is inexcusable. Has the Department of Finance such contempt for the Irish people that it thinks they should be dependent on journalists trawling the bars of the capital for news of what is actually happening within government institutions?

In one sense it seems unfair to single out an individual over the accounting mistake. Mr Cardiff was not personally at fault for the error. If there were mitigating circumstances those should be clarified, but, as secretary general of the Department of Finance, he must carry the ultimate responsibility for the mistake.

There appears to be a culture within the civil service that nobody is held responsible for mistakes, and the bigger the mistake, the more immunity appears to be conferred on those in authority. Under the last government it seemed that those in charge were not only exonerated for outrageous mistakes, but they were rewarded with magnificent pensions and exorbitant golden handshakes.

The Irish people essentially screamed their indignation at the polls in the last general election. The current government is making a grievous error if it thinks it can carry on as usual. This would be a perversion of our democracy and a crass insult to the Irish people.

Mr Cardiff will be retiring from the Department of Finance with a magnificent pension, while many of the people in the private sector that he was officially serving have had their pensions decimated through no fault of their own. Those charged with looking after our economy failed us miserably.

Our economy is in serious difficulty and our finances are in tatters, yet an accounting error of €3.6bn was allowed to go undetected, and now the Government is promoting the person with ultimate responsibility to the European Court of Auditors. Without any indication of clear mitigating circumstances, the appointment of Mr Cardiff would not only be an insult to our democracy but also to our European partners.