Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

Hardly a day goes by without the exposure of breath-taking amounts of waste in the Public Service. Recently we learned how FAS spent 600,000 euro on a television advertisement that was never screened, as well as paying huge sums for services that were never delivered.  But I think that this goes beyond simple waste. Waste is something children do, or those with lower levels of educational achievement. In other words waste is what poor, stupid people who don’t know any better. Although I may question the vaunted intellectual pretensions of senior civil servants and managers in the parastatal sector, they are far from stupid: they know what they’re doing.

I am saying that much of what goes under the rubric of waste is actually peculation, larceny and fraud on a grand scale by public officials. These people should be charged and imprisoned, not allowed to retire with expensive golden handshakes. But there is little hope of that. Were charges to be brought against them, the people who would sit in judgement i.e. senior judges would be cut from the same social cloth. They might very well be classmates from the same schools, maybe related by marriage even, and po0ssibly members of the same golf clubs.  (The law is full of fictions, including the notion that justice is blind. For that to happen the judges have to be blind too.)

There is no true ethos of public service in Ireland. Those working there are taught to see the public as the enemy. One of the worst insults you can pay a public servant is to call him or her just that – a public servant. They bristle with anger “Me? A servant? And of that dark, smelly enemy the public? Nay, nay and thrice nay – or rather the equivalent in Irish.

We may pride ourselves in having a public service that is not manifestly corrupt, as say somewhere like Italy or Kenya. Bribers don’t feature at the lower levels at least. But who is to say what goes on further up? And are we to define bribery and corruption solely in terms of the handover of cash?  Then there is the internal bribery, where certain departments and individuals are rewarded for “playing ball” or putting the telescope to their blind eye, by bonuses or greater access to resources.

So many of our public servants and representatives have cruelly perverted John F. Kennedy’s famous challenge “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country?” into “How can I do my country – and get away with it?”