Fergus Finlay: Do we want to live in an ugly state where only money matters?

'There is no example in the history of the world where an economy has gone bankrupt by setting out to apply principles of justice to its dealings with its citizens.'

We live, sometimes, in an ugly State. I’ve written that here before on a few occasions, and I find myself sometimes despairing about whether it’s something that can ever be fixed. It was borne in on me once again when I read my colleague Mick Clifford’s riveting article on Saturday about the way we have treated disabled drivers for years. The work of bean counters and their political masters, he called it.

You could give dozens of other examples to prove that Mick is right. The treatment of families looking for additional educational resources for a child with autism. The treatment of elderly people (and their families) who cannot find a place in a public nursing home and have to “go private” because they have no choice. The treatment of people who have been sexually abused in our primary care system. The treatment of people with disabilities whose allowances are promptly robbed from them the minute they go into a high-support residential situation. The treatment of people whose lives were devastated by thalidomide.

The thing they all have in common is this. The weaker and more fragile people are, the more silent their voices, the less powerful the lobbies representing them, and the more likely it is that they will be badly treated — sometimes to the point of abuse — by an ugly state.

But actually, Mick is wrong, at least in one important respect. 

Irish politicians aren’t cruel. Neither, by and large, are Irish public servants. The truth is they tend to live in fear, and that fear has created an implacable bureaucratic impulse 

The fear is the fear of the heavens falling in, and the impulse is to go to any lengths to prevent that from happening. And it’s not just ugly and cruel. It’s nonsense.

Because here’s the truth of it. And it’s the truth no bureaucracy ever wants you to know. The heavens never fall in.

I was listening to a debate on the radio the other day about the nursing home charges and the robbing of disability payments. The subject of redress came up, and some of the panellists were in favour of it. One, though, kept insistently demanding to know if the others were really proposing, in all seriousness, that taxpayers should foot the bill.

I wanted to roar two things at the radio, to try to get it into their heads once and for all. First, the Irish State has paid out billions in redress in respect of different injustices in recent years. It’s often happened under duress, and sometimes been done really grudgingly. But despite “the taxpayer” footing those bills, Ireland has become richer and richer. And the tax burden hasn’t grown.

Second, there is no example in the history of the world where an economy has gone bankrupt by setting out to apply principles of justice to its dealings with its citizens. 

Some of the most sustainably highly developed countries in our world are those that thrive on the promotion of equality and the elimination of inequality

Bureaucracies have different ways of saying the same thing. The heavens will fall in. The floodgates will open. An undesirable precedent is being created. They’re all the big lie, designed to frighten the lives out of their leaders.

When I started off as a political adviser many years ago a senior civil servant told me that the primary role of the civil service in a democracy was to point out the errors of their ways to politicians. If they couldn’t prevent them from making mistakes, at least they could point out where the mistakes were likely to happen.

Somewhere along the way, that impulse grew into a certainty that politicians would always get it wrong, and by doing so they would wreck the public purse. Whatever the hell the public purse is. There is now a dominant imperative, and it relies heavily on the big lie — that decency and compassion are the road to ruin.

Mismanagement of money

It may be because there was feckless spending and mismanagement along the way. There have been schemes and tax breaks and such that have been enormously expensive and done no lasting good at all (except they have enabled a few people to win a few elections, of course). The irony, of course, is that little if any of that spending was directed at people who have nothing or people who have been mistreated. The rule about tax breaks in Ireland has always been, the more you have the more you get.

The real distortion in all of this — and it’s thrown into sharp relief by the cheese-paring approach that treats disabled drivers like potential tax dodgers — is the underlying assumption that the public interest can only be measured by money. That’s the most pernicious lie of all, but it’s the most pervasive and dominant way of measuring public policy.

In my fundraising days, when I would ask business people to invest in our work, they would often ask searching questions. Like, what’s the return on the investment? Is there likely to be added value? Public servants only ever asked one question. How much will it cost? That’s the rule by which they are ordered to live their lives.

There is only one way to change that. We have to insert a public interest rule into public policy. And it needs to be done by law

At the moment, when the government is considering changes in law, the proposals in front of them are supposed to be gender-proofed. That was a change introduced in my time. I understand that proposals in front of the Government now also have to pass a climate test.

But in the future, every legislative measure — and every significant administrative decision — needs to be able to pass a public
interest test. It must be a test that enables government and the Oireachtas to be satisfied that a correct balance has been struck. Nobody wants a return to wild public spending, but do we really want to live in the sort of ugly state where only money matters?

 We passed a piece of legislation in 2014 establishing the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. It’s an effective body, and it has made a lot of people’s lives better. I’ve never heard anyone complain, in public anyway, that it’s a waste of money.

That legislation needs to be amended now. The commission needs to be vested with the authority to do two things — first, to draw up a public interest test and tell us all where the right balance should be struck. And second, to examine every single public policy proposal — legislative or administrative — to ensure that it achieves the balance in the test.

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And the law needs to compel every single government department and public body to submit its activities for examination under the test.

That may seem like a cumbersome approach. But changing the law to insist on a public interest element in decision-making is the only way to ensure that things are done out in the open.

If we get it right we will get rid of the ugly way we treat people when we accept that money matters more than justice and decency.

And we desperately need to do that.