Cork council merger: Red tape would strangle our true potential

Cork poet Theo Dorgan believes the inorganic, hubristic merging of city and county councils will be a bureaucratic nightmare.

Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was a rogue blacksmith who owned a metal bed.

He had the rather unfortunate habit of stretching his guests to fit the bed if they were too short, of cutting their legs to fit if they were too tall.

Procrustes is the patron saint of people who are addicted to trying to fit complex, unruly humanity to some theory or other, invariably botching it.

To the Procrustean, bureaucratic mind, a single authority for Cork City and county has its attractions: it concentrates power inwards and upwards, it allows for the making of endless flow charts and diagrams, the creation of new job titles, new management positions, and the employment of consultants — all irresistible to the managerial mindset.

Once upon a time we had a number of health boards, efficient or inefficient to varying degrees. These health boards were locally responsive, composed of staff and elected members who had to live in the communities they served.

Yes they needed reform, all institutions need to be reformed, sometimes radically, from time to time — but the demon of amalgamation was abroad in the land, and the health boards were replaced by a single national authority, the monstrously inefficient, top-heavy HSE, loaded with managers and managers of managers and yet more managers — with the familiar results we are forced to endure every day.

Once upon a time, we had local authorities responsible for the provision of water; these services need to be overhauled and modernised, but instead we were given the unholy monster that is Irish Water, staffed with the very same people who had failed for decades to supply us with clean water.

These grand initiatives are bound to end in tears: In each case, reality has to be bent and twisted, stretched or shortened, to fit the plan, and the real world always and everywhere insist on confounding The Plan.

The Greek concept of hubris explains a great deal. It means a lack of contact with the world as it is, an overestimation of one’s own competence or capability, and is the especial vice of people who exercise power that is checked neither by common sense nor any external force.

Someone decided, hubristically, that Irish Water was a good idea, just as someone decided to create the HSE, absolutely convinced, with no evidence, that these were good ideas. An arbitrary decision was made, and then came the terrible and doomed business of putting will before evidence, stubborness before common sense, with the results we all now have to live with.

Cities are not created, or brought into being to fulfil some preconceived plan. Cities evolve, just as societies evolve, by an almost infinite combination of elements working through time.

A convenient place where sea meets river evolves as a port, a door into the wider world, attracting people from the hinterland to build walls and quays, homes, warehouses, churches. Somebody opens a shop, a pub, a doctor’s surgery. Children are born, and schools are built.

Cities grow outward from a physical and human core, and over the generations a city culture develops, a matrix of services grows up, and all this is built on the irrestistible human desire to form intelligible communities, with their own particular stories and songs, their own distinctive webs of loyalty and tradition.

In other words, the city declares itself into history, defines itself through and for and by its own sense of itself.

And the same, though with a reverse polarity, is true of the countryside.

Stewardship of the land, the setting down of roots and allegiances in a farming or herding community also evolves over time, creating its own set of stories, its own particular history.

Both kinds of evolution are equally valid, and so are the administrative imperatives and cultures that evolve with those communities. To decide arbitrarily to yoke together as if they were one culture two very different kinds of community is to pit will, arbitrary and hubristic will, against evolution and common sense. To invent a single authority to rule over such different cultures flies in the face not just of evidence but of common sense.

The city is not the county, each has its identity, its historically accumulated logic of growth and need and yes, of course, some kind of co-ordination would help to ensure that each feeds the other — but the city will always be the city, and the county will always be the county, no matter what flow-charts and diagrams the hubristic and Procustean managerial mind attempts to impose on the reality.

Now might be a good time to meditate on that infamous moment in Cabinet when Garret Fitzgerald said to someone who’d solved a problem: “That’s all very well in practice, but will it work in theory?”

Theo Dorgan is a lecturer, poet, and documentary-maker.