Who to blame for our public service shambles
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.
3. Farcical West Clare Railway organisation structures are left in place as if sacrosanct. The worst example is the road network where construction, maintenance and policing involves four Government departments, the NRA and 35 sovereign republics (the councils). Since 1995, ‘poor’ Portugal has transformed its road network while ‘rich’ Ireland has only a patchwork (There is nothing at all in Co Galway). Aptly, ‘bóthar’ translates as ‘cowtrack.’
4. Services such as ESB and car-testing work because they are under professional management and organisation independent of the Department of Finance and day-to-day political control with a direct customer/supplier income and responsibility relationship.
Subsidies, where required, can be provided direct to individuals via social welfare, as with ‘free’ ESB and phone at present. We will have credible roads and health services only under this model and if politicians have the guts to take on comfortable vested interests to bring it about. Otherwise promises are only hot air.
Dr Martin Newell
Chartered Engineer
Baranny
Annaghdown
Galway
