McLoughlin PAC stonewalling may have done us a favour

YOU may not know it but most of your life as a citizen is regulated by something called ‘the system’.

This is what, on the inside, the apparatus of government is called by those who administer it. You may imagine I am referring to the ministers you see on the telly and that are written about, not always glowingly, in this newspaper and elsewhere. But you would be wrong. No, ‘the system’ is much more exclusive. It is the civil service; in practice, the senior civil servants that run it. Occasionally looser usage of the term stretches to include state agencies. But they are generally held in the same regard that Jesuits held Christian Brothers; not much. State agencies may be delegated the doing of, but they are seldom called upon when it comes to the deciding.

In ‘the system’ ministers are club house members. They have the best seats, enjoy due deference but they are as useful as decoys as they are as deciders. They make speeches, take flak and where necessary lose elections to ensure democratic accountability. Then ‘the system’ moves on.

Last Tuesday’s bitter exchanges at the Dáil Public Accounts Committee exposed the futility of Ireland’s parliamentary oversight. Incensed by what he saw as stonewalling, Seán Fleming told the Department of Health Secretary General Ambrose McLoughlin, ‘you are not fit for office ... you should resign’.

Dr McLoughlin attended the Public Accounts Committee, or PAC in Leinster House lingo, accompanied by the acting CEO of the HSE, Tony O’Brien. To understand the issues at play it is important to understand that Ambrose McLoughlin was present not as Secretary General of the Department of Health but as its accounting officer. The distinction is important.

As Secretary General he accounts to the Minister James Reilly for the administration of the department. As accounting officer he accounts to the PAC for the monies voted to his department. Dr McLoughlin is also chairman of the HSE.

The PAC is an audit committee. Their job is to keep everyone honest and to ensure that the waste or misapplication of funds is highlighted. Like the officials appearing before it, it does not have a function in scrutinising or determining policy. In a parliamentary system with ineffectual oversight of the executive, the PAC highlights inefficiency and malfeasance. It thitherto operated on a non-partisan basis.

Separating a money trail from policy decisions in practice is messy. Politicians are ever up for a chance to have a go. Civil servants are properly concerned to stay out of the political dog fight. Dr McLoughlin and Mr O’Brien arrived at the PAC in what was already a tetchy atmosphere. Evidently there had been attempts to preempt examination either of policy issues or of still current accounts for 2012. The officials, both on their first outing, correctly but ineptly lectured the PAC on the boundaries beyond which they could not be questioned. New boys and outsiders to ‘the system’, they lacked the street smarts of more seasoned colleagues.

Health, the largest organisation and the second largest budget in the public service, could on current trends exceed its allocation by €500m this year. The PAC, which will have responsibility to examine the wreckage, has no power to stop the juggernaut before it goes over the cliff. There may be, as Dr James Reilly says, a plan to avoid the pitfall, but it cannot be forensically tested.

As administration becomes more complex, the oversight of ministers becomes more distant. In any government hardly half of ministers are fully in control of their departments. A few are little more than stooges. Most ministers are somewhere between master and minion. They have priorities, they have pressures and as inadequately supported generalists among specialists, by design or default, they defer for the rest to the experts. Except civil servants, if usually highly experienced, are seldom experts. In the Irish system they are overwhelmingly generalists too. By dint of long service and inter-departmental immobility they acquire the institutional memory and the territorial attitude that makes ‘the system’ disjointed, introspective and highly defensive. Secretaries General of departments, ‘the system’s’ commanding officers, rise from the bottom up. Recent changes, and a change of attitude on the part of this government, saw two candidates appointed from the outside. One to finance and another, Dr Ambrose McLoughlin, to health.

Secretary Generals like Ambrose McLoughlin are immensely powerful. Over time they can exercise a greater influence than the politicians they serve. If the lack of accountability of ministers to the Dáil is acute, the lack of accountability of senior officials is nearly total.

Officials, however, ultimately operate the system that is legislated for by politicians. If senior officials are culpable in our current malaise, politicians are ultimately responsible. Specific responsibility for the debacle at the PAC last Tuesday lies squarely with a budgetary process that precludes effective examination of the estimates for a department in a given year until a Revised Book of Estimates is approved, and that is seldom before March. The responsible policy committee that could have asked the pertinent questions, the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children, did not examine the over €13bn voted to health for 2012 until May 17. That examination was cursory, lamentably late and wholly ineffectual.

Tellingly too when estimates for a current year are eventually presented, it is by the minister. The secretary general as accounting officer seldom attends. There should be an earlier and recurring examination of a department’s budget. Ministers should be asked the political questions about the policy and accounting officers should be asked if the sums add up. They should then be held to account. That of course would require a fundamental reconfiguration of the relationship between ministers and their officials.

The Programme for Government contains commitments to set out legally the relationship between officials and ministers, and to introduce new guidelines for officials’ accountability to Oireachtas Committees. Dr McLoughlin, unaccustomed to ‘the system’, displayed overtly a power that is usually exercised obliquely. If he provokes the radical change in parliamentary oversight of ministers and accounting officers clearly required, he will at his first attempt have performed a singular service.

* Gerard Howlin is a public affairs consultant, and was a government adviser from 1997 to 2007.