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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— December - January
Upgrade the C and AG, improve transparency and anti-corruption laws
and develop a vision of the public interest
j o a n b u r t o n , d e p u t y l e a d e r o f t h e l a b o u r p a r t y
2010
is over and hopefully
in this year all over the world we will quickly
clean up a global mess and move on. It won’t
be an easy task to disentangle two major wars,
sort out delinquent banks and get some sense
of control over our economic and environmen-
tal destiny but we do need to inject some confi-
dence and hope into our psyche.
Some of the despair that I hear in the voices
of people who talk and write to me is rooted in
their belief that our political institutions are
not fit for the great purpose of economic and
social renewal. It is hard to disagree with that
judgment. It really is the single most pressing
issue that Ireland needs to confront as soon as
possible in this new decade.
We have all the trappings of a modern
robust democracy: political parties, parliamen-
tary procedures, laws that require ministerial
accountability, regular elections. It is what our
grandparents longed for but these institutions
did not rise to the challenges of recent years.
The list of failed projects that our political
system tolerated in the past decade is enormous.
The catastrophic bank guarantee stands out for
me as the most significant because it demon-
strates so clearly the shocking power of vested
interests casually to oblige the State to assume
their commercial debts as sovereign debts.
Another case in point was the outrageous
deal with the religious congregations to trans-
fer the bulk of their child-abuse liabilities to
the taxpayer. Plus decentralisation, electronic
voting, the Official Languages Act. If I were to
list all the failures of policy it would only sap
the reader’s will.
My work in the Dáil is mainly concerned
with public finance. I served on the Public
Accounts Committee and have observed the
process of spending controls with some care.
This entire system needs to be overhauled from
top to bottom.
the 2010s are upon us
Also in this section
Bertie’s garden
Boosting the economy
Public-sector wages
Rossport
PPPs
“Our political
institutions are
not fit for the
great purpose
of economic and
social renewal”
On the PAC I came to admire the work of the
Comptroller and Auditor General (C and AG) and
I want to suggest an extension to the mandate
of that office. The USA has the Congressional
Budget Office that does independent evaluations
of spending proposals. Our C and AG can only
report after the event. The mandate should be
extended to enable a mandatory evaluation of
cost to be tabled with every new proposal.
We have bitter experience of rabbits out of
hats on budget days that turn out to cost way in
excess of what was first indicated. The decen-
tralisation fiasco is one example as is the
announcement of the medical cards for the
over s which came with a cost tag that did
not reflect in any way the true ultimate cost. An
extension to the C and AG’s function could obvi-
ate such débacles. It should also cover regular
policy audits to see if the stated objectives of
particular policies have been met. For example,
while I support the policy of free tuition fees in
higher education, it ought to be the subject of a
regular forensic audit to review its efficacy.
We could also borrow another procedure
from the US Congress. I refer to the rule that cer-
tain public appointments be subject to commit-
tee scrutiny and vote. The Office of C and AG and
the appointment of the Ombudsman are already
subject to a Dáil vote but this is a formal process.
I want the nominees to face a polite but thorough
interview. The other offices I have in mind are
the Financial Regulator, Central Bank Governor,
Chair of the proposed Election Commission, and
- certainly - the Chair of NAMA.
My party has long demanded a new law to
protect whistleblowers. No institutional reform
would be complete without such a measure. The
Freedom of Information Act has proved its
worth beyond measure and a new Government
committed to reform should extend its scope
and restore most of the sections that were
deleted by FF in .
Political lobbying is a secret world that
needs to be opened out and examined. A regis-
ter of lobbyists would be a good first step. Then
it gets difficult …
When does a pleasant lunch cross the line
between a social occasion and a lobbying exer-
cise? Even I was invited to have breakfast with
the board of AIB - a strictly tea and toast affair
in my case, I assure you. Did my two cups of
tea (the toast had run out by the time the plate
reached me) constitute an AIB lobby of the
Labour Party?
Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan
describe an episode in their book The Builders.
It concerns a lunch organised by a leading
auctioneer arranged, when Brian Cowen was
Minister for Finance, so he could meet the big
players among Ireland’s developers, while the
Budget was in preparation. The venue was a pri-
vate dining room in the Radisson, Four Seasons
or some such. Ostensibly it was a social function
with no purpose other than to eat, drink and
be merry among friends. Nevertheless one can
assume these hard-nosed businessmen (there
are no women at these events) took the oppor-
tunity to let the Minister know what they would
like to happen on the policy front in any Budget
or Finance Bill that was in the offing.
Now how could you describe that event? Is it
lobbying or is it lunch? It certainly wasn’t a free
lunch. Mc Donald and Sheridan report that one
participant had to write a cheque for € to
FF soon afterwards.
As a Sean O’Casey character might say,
there’s lobbying and there’s lobbying.
Lobbying is one of the dark arts of influence
peddling. We need to know more about it and to
have much stricter rules and a clear open record
of who meets Ministers and senior officials.
We have had years of tribunals and
still we don’t have a modern enforceable Anti
Corruption Law. Amazingly, even people who
were named by Judge Flood in for cor-
rupt payments and tax evasion have never been
disqualified as company directors let alone face
more serious penalties. Some are likely to have
their debts assumed by NAMA. It beggars
belief that this Government has done nothing
to update the law on corruption, the penalties
for corruption, the criminal procedures and the
standard of proof required to secure conviction.
Such a law, in my view, is a basic requirement of
political reform.
I have been reading remarks by Simon
Johnson, a former IMF official with long expe-
rience of economic crises. This is what he has
to say:
“the real concern of the fund’s senior staff,
and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost
invariably the politics of countries in crisis.
Typically, these countries are in a desperate
economic situation for one simple reason—
the powerful elites within them overreached in
good times and took too many risks”.
Sounds familiar.
So how does the IMF judge a Government’s
resolve?
“The IMF staff looks into the eyes of the min-
ister of finance and decides whether the govern-
ment is serious. The fund will give a country a
loan but first it wants to make sure the Minister
is ready, willing, and able to be tough on some
of his friends. If he is not ready to throw former
pals to the wolves, the IMF can wait”.
I wonder how an IMF team would judge the
capacity of this set of Ministers to face down
their old cronies. Would a serious IMF team look
Brian Cowen in the eye and see there a man with
the resolve with the determination to show his
former friends the door.
Well, would he? I think we all know the
answer to that. It might have to come to that
eventually but for the moment this Government
displays a mindset that the plain people of
Ireland are to be the first in the firing line. The
children of Ireland are to be the target of cuts
in welfare, in education, in health-care before
any effort is made to face down the élite that has
been the favoured recipient of public largesse, of
tax breaks, of easy tax-exile status, of Cinderella
rules, of public contracts.
Fintan O’Toole has made an eloquent case
for a Second Republic in his book Ship of Fools.
Ireland must “invent a future for itself”.
On the eve of this new decade, that is our
main task.
