Buck stops with Harney and Ahern

Not one, but two expensive computer systems have been put on hold by the Health Services Executive (HSE) because of doubts over their long-term value.

Joining the inglorious PPARS is the financial management system FISP, another brainchild of Deloitte & Touche, which so far has cost €30 million.

Between them, these two anagrams have collectively cost the taxpayers in the region of €180m, and the HSE has suspended the expansion of both to evaluate whether they are adequate for future needs.

It would be futile for the Department of Health and the HSE to try to lay off the blame for this fiasco on any anonymous third party. The project was overseen by a national steering comjmThis saga raises the over-reliance, indeed, the obsession, this Government has about consultants.

There was no need for Tánaiste Mary Harney to state the glaringly obvious when she said the hiring of consultants had become the “norm” in recent years.

At this stage the country is practically run by consultants, special advisers and experts on one thing or another, whom ministers can point to when anything goes awry. Deflecting responsibility to the consultants, or anybody else, is what is happening.

Both Ms Harney and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern are concentrating on the cost paid to consultants Deloitte & Touche, exonerating themselves from responsibility for the entire debacle. Yet, both of them should accept the blame because that is where it lies.

While acknowledging that the costs of this system, now at least temporarily abandoned, escalated out of all proportion, both she and Mr Ahern continue to defend it.

Government departments are littered with expensive computer systems that give bad value, or none, to the taxpayers who have to bear their cost and suffer the loss of vital services on which the squandered money should have been spent.

That experience includes the garda PULSE, an animal health system in Agriculture, the notorious and abandoned €50m electronic voting and the PPARS.

Even yesterday the Oireachtas public accounts committee was told how the Justice Department was forced to abandon a human resources system for prisons.

This, apparently, proved not to be appropriate for prison management and more than half a million euro was spent before it was abandoned last December.

Probably more designed to show himself in a better fiscal light than his ministers, Mr Ahern raised a very pertinent point when he told the Dáil his own department introduced a computer system at the cost of just €5m.

It could be done so cheaply because the department employed its own staff, rather than outside experts, to implement the project.

It begs the question as to why other departments could not drastically reduce the almost criminal waste which has become endemic in governmental administration.

Undoubtedly, Ms Harney unwittingly hit upon the truth when, in referring to hiring consultants having become the norm, she said public servants were often not respected or trusted in these areas.

Very significantly, and an aspect of PPARS which was not highlighted sufficiently, was the system threatened the “basic functioning” of at least one hospital, St James’s Hospital in Dublin.

The opinion of John O’Brien, the then chief executive of the hospital, now a key adviser to the chief executive of the HSE, Professor Brendan Drumm, was that the system was “a disaster”.

Given that experience, it is baffling that PPARS is still operating in four health regions, and it might have been a judicious decision yesterday on the part of the HSE to suspend using the “disaster” entirely.