Reform must begin in Dáil and include civil and public service
“Authority” is a word being bandied about this week in talks about talks on the formation of a new government. What authority means, lest there be any doubt, is control.
What is at stake is not just who is in government, it is how government is done.
Specifically, the authority required is continuance of the domination of the legislature by the executive. I purposely say the executive, not the government.
By executive, I mean the executive arm of the State, including the civil service and public service agencies. The elected government is only one part of the executive and, its own pretensions and the expectations visited on it notwithstanding, it is not always the most important.
It is, however, the government that is nominally always in charge, and sometimes really is. Lest this be imagined as supposition, the recent banking inquiry is proof of how, by virtue of its scale and complexity, most of the apparatus of state is usually beyond the horizon, let alone the control, of ministers.
The authority sought now, wearing mufti to appear as stable government, is to ensure a continuation of that comfortable slackness which characterises our system, except in occasional moments of crisis. Then it is too late. The most obvious slackness is between the elected legislature and the government accountable to it. This may be the most obvious, though it is not always the most important.
For all its inadequacy it is government, in the 15 ministers at the cabinet table, which is most accountable in our dysfunctional system. Proposals put forward by the Independent Alliance, Fianna Fáil, and others to strengthen the Dáil should be pursued. I have said from the outset that looking at the current hiatus as some sort of pseudo crisis is nonsense. From a historical perspective, it is the opportunity to have the democratic revolution. Simply voting for an overwhelming change of political personnel in 2011 failed to deliver.
There is cynicism about the motives of some, especially Fianna Fáil, being angels of reform now, when they did little in office.
It’s largely justified. Aside from Noel Dempsey, who persevered through thick and thin to abolish the dual mandate for councillors and Oireachtas members, political reform had little consistent interest. The outgoing government was equally underwhelming. But politics is transactional. Agendas move on, and whether from altruism or cynicism, it is on the agenda now and the opportunity should be seized. Reform should obviously start in the Dáil, and in the first instance follow the money. The core function of the Dáil, besides assenting to a declaration of war, is raising and spending money. The inadequacy of the resources of the legislature to scrutinise the executive in the wider sense, including the government in the narrower political sense, in how it spends money voted by the Dáil, is almost total. In making key financial decisions which are the core of a legislator’s responsibility, most TDs are playing blind man’s buff. Alarmingly, so are many ministers.
Scrutiny, to be effective, must extend to the civil and public service. This is where most of the information and an astonishing amount of real responsibility lie. It requires expertise, which must be based in the Oireachtas, to pursue labyrinthine rivulets of public spending, coursing with public money.
Our public servants are overwhelmingly honest. They are, for all practical purposes, also effectively almost unaccountable, at least on a sustained basis.
Unless Dáil reform that begins with ministers continues onto senior officials, it will stop well short of the nexus of actual power, as distinct from notional responsibility.
The reality of Irish government, like Los Angeles, is that there is no centre and no body capable of consistent command and control. There is no effective means of getting around its constituent parts quickly, either.
In-between responsibility rests in occluded areas of no-man’s land. If a minister or official under pressure can put one foot in that space, regardless of where their hands have been previously, they can claim sanctuary from responsibility.
The entire system depends on these regular rest stops. This is the unity, indeed often the only effective unity, of the executive in the wider sense. What is at issue when they speak of ‘authority’ is control. What is at risk is freedom from effective responsibility, a lot of the time.
The first essential task of the new Dáil, having elected a ceann comhairle, is to establish a finance committee or by some other mechanism to hold hearings with the minister for finance and, more critically, finance officials, to ascertain exactly what is inside the now notorious fiscal space. It is only by credibly scoping out what is available, that policies can be negotiated and agreed.
Forming a new government is not an emergency issue. Reforming how government is done, is. This is our opportunity, and the potential permanent legacy of the 32nd Dáil.
The big picture is made up of a million pixels. In terms of spending, the second-largest budget but the least predictable, is health. The consequence of a health spending overrun in 2016 is enormous.
The traditional remedy of a supplementary budget is unavailable under new EU rules. The knock-on consequences for a new government and the policies agreed by it will reverberate across every other policy.
The new Dáil needs to hear directly from the civil service management of the Department of Health about whether spending is already running ahead of profile and if so, under what headings and to what extent.
If the 32nd Dáil were serious about accountability it would institutionalise monthly reporting in person before the relevant committee, from all secretaries general. This institutionalising of reporting on the record would cut through the miasma of responsibility.
That would be an exercise of “authority” and a real loosening of control.
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