AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
The story feels like that line from Frank Sinatra’s song High Hopes – ‘Woops there goes another rubber tree plant’. Not a plant in this case but yet another high profile example of a waste of taxpayers’ money. This time the Arts Council was at fault for wasting €7 million on an IT solution, intended to streamline a clunky grants application system, but had to be scrapped.
That 1959 song is about animals that have ‘high apple pie in the sky hopes’ of achieving impossible feats, like the ant who tries to move rubber tree plants all by itself and ‘woops!’ There have been more than a few ‘woops’ stories of late concerning overspending, often combined with lack of oversight. Among the tip of the iceberg ones that we know about are the €2.3 billion on the yet-to-open Children’s hospital, the €336,000 Dail bike shed which still doesn’t stop bike saddles from getting wet, RTE’s €2.2 million loss on the Toy Show musical, €17 million overruns by the HSE, €1.4 million on a Dail security hut… the list goes on.
Isn’t there a parallel here? Ireland is rich enough to realise high hopes yet, like the ongoing crisis in housing and the health service, seems mission impossible. At the same time vital services for disability, carers and the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services( CHAMS) are starved on funds while on the other hand there is profligate waste of money. It doesn’t make sense, an ineffective system which doesn’t deliver, combined with ‘money no objec’t spending while essential help services face famine.
The powers that be – on the one hand the Government and on the other the regulatory mechanisms of the civil service – don’t seem able to unravel the ongoing conundrum.
Remember Mr Micawber’s principle inA Christmas Carol – annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds ought and six, result misery. Budgeting and making ends meet is hard enough in the average household, never mind balancing the books to look after 5.38 million of us.
It is not that there aren’t the necessary bean counters and rules to police spending. There’s the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER), the Department of Procurement; in 2024 there were 373,285 civil servants costing €25,481 million (excluding local authority employees). Each department is responsible for managing its own budget with protocols in place for governance, oversight, chain of command and reporting relationships with plenty of precautionary red tape to keep things under control and at the same time slow them down.
Then there is the watchdog Public Accounts Committee which recently uncovered more instances of wasteful spending from the ballooning cost of medical cards for the elderly, originally €9 million jumping to €55 million, €70,000 for curtains at Dublin Castle to the millions tied up in OPW properties which are not in use.
Maybe we should bring in Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur now in charge of Trump’s Department of Government Economy (DOGE) to sort things out. Maybe his approach is a bit too radical though, as he offers thousands of public servants ‘take it or leave it’ deals to go and plans to cut off funding to USAid projects.
The definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. What is needed is clear analysis of what is going wrong and action by the Government so that things can be done differently. We need to stop spending money wastefully on the one hand, especially with Trump threatening a trade war. One the other hand there needs to be reform of the administrative system which is frustrating the effective use of money and slowing the implementation of policy.
But those hands currently aren’t working as efficiently as they could to get a cost effective job done. The effect of the planning system on housing solutions and the HSE on health outcomes are examples of poorly function systems.
In our own household spending we need to ask ourselves: do we need it, is it value for money and is it fit for purpose? State spending with taxpayers’ money needs to abide by the same principles. When household machinery isn’t functioning properly, it’s our responsibility to get it fixed. Same goes for the Government when the administration is malfunctioning.
Then we can rely on those high hopes.
