Serving on state boards no great gravy train

WHEN one reaches the point of drawing up a bucket list for whatever time remains on this earth, there’s usually travel or learning; sometimes adventure, sexual or otherwise.

But I suspect that few people ever write on their list: I want to be a member of a State board.

Nonetheless, portrayal of State board membership by the ‘meeja’ is such that it appears to be a combination of winning the Euromillions and spending a gymnastic night with Halle Berry. Membership of a State board, or so we are led to believe, is only earned through decades of cult-like devotion to whatever political party is in power. And once their well-upholstered backsides are crammed into the seats of power, off goes the Gravy Train to pick up all their mates. Because it’s not about what you know — it’s about what clichés you can use against people you don’t like.

Like the vast majority of Irish citizens, I have absolutely no idea what State boards actually do: but I do suspect that being on the board of the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board or Ordnance Survey Ireland might not quite be the funfest it’s portrayed as being. Even if there were fantastic expenses and huge fees, would you want to spend hours discussing the shapes of taxi signs or State regulation of people who realign chakras? Of course you would.

Well, what if the cash rewards weren’t so fantastic then? Some boards pay a fee (€6-€15,000 a year), others pay just expenses. What then? Fifteen grand for doing nothing? If your answer is ‘yes please’, then you’re every bit as bad as the political elite you are cocking a cynical eye towards. Because as a responsible tax-paying citizen, shouldn’t your first concern be that all the members of Ordnance Survey Ireland should know something about maps? Or ordnance. Or surveying.

State boards are, of course, littered with people with connections to the current (or previous) political administrations. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are not qualified to sit on those boards — or that they aren’t doing this work for the right reasons: to try and make our country a wee bit better.

They may also be doing it to make better contacts and further their own ambitions. But again, one does not necessarily cancel out the other. Few of us work because we adore our employer. We do it for to help others and ourselves. We use contacts: in exactly the same way that people do in the political world.

The usual response to this is that politicians should be held to a higher standard; that they should be morally better than us. But if we really believed that, then why do we keep voting for the same ones?