Evidence and Vision, then Policy

April  3

EDITORIAL

Issue 54

April 2017

Village Magazine promotes

in its columns the fair

distribution of resources,

welfare, respect and

opportunity by the analysis

and investigation of

inequalities, unsustainable

development and

corruption, and the media’s

role in their perpetuation;

and by acute cultural

analysis.

ONLINE

www.villagemagazine.ie

@VillageMagIRE

EDITOR

Michael Smith

editor@villagemagazine.ie

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Eoghan Carroll

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Evidence and

Vision, then Policy

Simon Coveney’s avoidance of the facts

on housing completions is a metaphor for

our governance

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OW DID public policy go off the rails? Indeed how

was policy always so skewed? For Village, equal

ity of outcome, sustainability of the environment

and accountability are political imperatives but - whether

or not this radical agenda appeals - at a minimum Public

Policy should be evidence-based and serve the public

interest, conducing to improvements in the quality of life

of the people.

Yet such an approach is anathema to the voguish poli-

ticians of our age: from the goldﬁsh-attention-spanned

Mr Trump to the economics - and history-illiterate

stormtroopers of Brexit to the foreigner-blamers in

France, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary and beyond.

In Ireland too we eschew good policy. We lead this edi

tion of Village with the failure of the Department of the

Environment under Simon Coveney to treat seriously

what his government describes as its “number one prior-

ity”, housing: they can’t even compile useful statistics on

housing completions. As Mel Reynolds ﬁrst pointed out

on these pages, housing-completion ﬁgures for last year

were - at absolute best - 7300, not the claimed 15,000.

How can you make policy when you don’t even know the

scale of the problem you’re addressing; when you have

to lie about it?

Of course Minister Coveney is not alone. The Minister

for Justice and the Garda Commissioner remain rooted

in ofﬁce, though the Garda recorded a million breath

tests more than the actual number carried out, probably

because someone’s promotion, or salary, would beneﬁt

from an indicator of commitment. The Garda also seem

to have concocted the crime ﬁgures, at least on domes

tic violence and murders but let’s face it probably on

everything else too.

Clearly the problems are not of oversight or strategy

but of culture. Conor Lenihan outlines in this month’s

magazine a history of delinquency. But we’re not serious

about reform: sure it might wreck everyone’s head.

We’ve looked into the Garda enough. From Morris to

Smithwick to Fennelly to O’Neill investigations have

uncovered bits and pieces but rarely the whole picture,

and clearly the follow-ups have been nugatory.

Moreover, from the Beef tribunal report, which was tai-

lored to advance its judicial author's career, to the

Moriarty Tribunal's defanged ﬁndings on Denis O'Brien,

to the vastly discredited Planning tribunal our major non-

Garda investigations too have often got diverted and

have characteristically been undeﬁnitive and unreform-

ing, though they often attracted media approbation.

While many countries have their political weak spots

in these fascist-tickling post-truth times, unserious Ire

land runs a particularly fragile regime when it comes to

impropriety. This magazine considers that the political

process has abjured action on the biggest corruption

issues of our time.

If we cared about Policy and Reform we’d have some

clue why our health services are in disarray and

disimproving.

The central plans of health policy were supposed to

be universal insurance and the elimination of fees for

primary care ie GPs. A White Paper on Universal Health

Insurance was published in 2014. The debate was always

too much about the cost of this rather than on how a

focus on insurance might actually serve the presumed

goal of universal healthcare. In the end then Health Min-

ister Leo Varadkar suspended it, likening universal

health insurance to Irish Water. He claimed it would have

been impossible to impose the extra fees without a back-

lash from struggling families. While denying the

Coalition had performed a U-turn on its central health

policy, he was unable to give any speciﬁc year as to when

a new version will be introduced.

Varadkar also conﬁrmed before the 2016 election was

called that Fine Gael could not commit to the introduc-

tion of universal care in the next Dáil term due to a

shortage of GPs. Free GP care for children under 6 and

for persons aged 70 and over were implemented but of

course, these changes prejudice needy patients, as

opposed to ones who come within the age strictures, and

anecdote suggests there has been a big increase in visits

to GPs by under-sixes.

If we were serious about Policy, we’d have ensured

that the religious congregations paid compensation

commensurate to their abuses , we’d ensure that educa-

tional standards improve year on year, we’d be less

concerned about water charges than VAT, income tax and

capital taxes which yield far greater dividends. If we

cared about policy we’d have dumped Michael Healy Rae

and his clan; and Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and their allies in

confused ‘non-ideological’ ‘centrist’ ‘pragmatism’: the

swamp out of which emerges policy-based evidence

making, and jobs for the boys.

We don’t even as a country have any idea of the goal of

national policy. If it is quality of life then that should be

measured. In default, because it is the default measure

of our success as a society, we’ll continue to pursue an

economic agenda of GDP maximisation even though it

plunders the environment. An oil-slick-and-cleanup reg-

isters as an increase in economic activity/GDP and does

not necessarily increase the happiness of the citizenry.

We should measure quality of life across dozens of indica-

tors from equality (the Gini Coefﬁcient etc) to crime and

unemployment rates, water and air quality, commuting

times and even people’s perceptions of their happiness.

If we don’t compile the evidence, there is no chance,

if we ever decide to get serious about Vision and Policy,

that we’ll be able to act on it.