Explain please - Flood relief spending

TUESDAY’S budget confirmed for anyone who cared to see that our public finances, still dependent on an extraordinarily narrow tax base, are better than they were but still pretty precarious. 

Despite the end-austerity-now mantra, there remains little enough capacity for largesse or, in too many cases, even enough to support the kind of service that should be everyday in a rich country like this.

For that reason, something that looks like the misuse if not waste of public funds rankles with anyone who, when they decide to spend money, must spend their own — after they earn it. Today’s story around how funds designated for flood relief in Crookstown, Co Cork, were spent seems to fall into that murky, Alice in Wonderland category.

A third of the €300,000 allocated for flood relief works was spent on a cost/benefit analysis to establish if the project represented value for money. Effective oversight and transparency are essential in all public projects but this seems at best bizarre and pretty questionable. Cork County Council need to explain why so much money was spent on red tape.