Who to blame for our public service shambles

THE major public services of roads, health, policing and driver-testing are a chronic, costly shambles while comparable services like ESB, VHI, treatment purchase, phones (since 1984) and car-testing cause little outcry. Why?

1. The fossilised annual stop/start ‘lucky dip’ handout procedures of the Department of Finance, inherited in 1924 from repressive 19th century British colonial practice, make it impossible to run a modern customer-orientated service. They are a manifest recipe for waste and impossibility of planning; they facilitate incompetence and avoidance of responsibility while penalising efficiency.

2. Any service which has a politician as its temporary executive head is doomed. Political, clientilist and often corrupt interference in day-to-day management ensure that staff become demoralised and adopt an understandable ‘couldn’t-care-less’ culture. Powerful trade unions fill the vacuum.