John McGuinness: Who is really in charge of running the country?

Real power lies within the civil service, but it needs a radical overhaul to make it into an efficient body that benefits the country, writes John McGuinness
John McGuinness: Who is really in charge of running the country?

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Mary Lou McDonald’s recent comment made in her interview with the Irish Examiner regarding the need for senior civil and public servants to pull up their socks is a welcome one, and deserves support from all parties in the Dáil.

Other recent reports in the Irish Times and Irish Independent show a widespread disquiet on the issue.

I began seriously questioning the culture of the civil service in 2008 in an article published at the time.

It may have been severe, but I stand over what I said, not that it had much of an effect.

There is any amount of thwarted, trapped potential lying unused or underused in the civil service.

Encouraged, rather than restrained, it could create a cutting-edge institution that would be of inestimable benefit to Ireland’s economy. However, without support and pressure from politicians and trades unions, it will remain an engine of growth within our economy that is not pulling its weight.

With politics in decline, it’s clear that real power lies with the civil service. 

However, the cumulative effect of ducking, diving, and denying what the public has seen in various scandals over the last decade has been very damaging to its reputation and exposed a culture that has become arrogant and unaccountable. 

That culture is not easily challenged or changed: its ruling class is formidable and powerful, and a network of connections with vested interests will spring to its defence. The civil service can quietly wreck political and civil service careers, deny access to unfavourable media representatives, and be very unpleasant to its critics.

The Dáil committee system has been attacked, and accusations about ‘grandstanding politicians’ have become a media staple. This has enabled some, worried about the close attention being paid to their departments, to undermine committees’ effectiveness by using rules, regulations, and strictures designed to blunt their teeth. Dáil committees are now surrounded on all sides by wagging fingers bent on containment and control, which members should forcefully reject.

The Public Accounts Committee, of which I was chair for five years, was a particular target of civil service-inspired opprobrium because it is tasked with dealing with the spending of taxpayers’ money.

Those who criticise the robustness of PAC’s approach conveniently forget that it faces senior, experienced, and hard-boiled company and public and civil service executives, capable of looking after themselves and adept at hiding facts that the PAC wants to get at.

Robust questioning — ‘grandstanding’ to those feeling the heat — was often necessary to overcome the obfuscations and dissimulations offered, but it was nothing like the withstanding and arrogance that PAC had to deal with.

Since I entered the Dáil in 1997, there has been a noticeable change in the relationship between it and senior civil servants. This has resulted in its power and influence being eroded, and it is now a shadow of what the public imagine it to be.

The Dáil has become a creature of the civil service, as has local government, where 30 or so all-powerful county managers, in full control of county councillors, are taking power further and further away from the people.

An administrative structure has been quietly created: a nightmare of quangos, subsidiary public service organisations, satellite companies and organisations and committees of one sort or another. It’s almost impossible for politicians, the public, or the media to get to the bottom of many of the scandals that are now finding their way into the light. 

That structure is expensive to run, impossible to control, and puts too much power in the hands of a few.

Outraged politicians demanding action in the Dáil make little or no headway. 

The State trundles on, rolling over the just demands of those citizens damaged by its insouciance and over demands for explanations for incompetence, such as the Children’s Hospital, driven by a determination not to change, explain, or divert.

The management of our country and the viability of our democratic institutions depend on the civil service and the Dáil exerting pressure on one another — a healthy tension that balances and prevents an excess of risk-taking, caution, or self-interest, and power by either side. The relationship between senior civil servants and the ministers they serve — if that is the word — might wax and wane in the maintaining of that tension, but the dominance of one over the other can, at worst, lead to rule by a group of autocrats. And I believe we are heading in that direction.

There is now, I believe, a group of senior civil servants who, having experienced the EU, dream of autocracy. 

They have quietly fashioned a Dáil that is a Punch and Judy show, providing a touch of theatre and a semblance of democracy, but toothless and malleable. 

Its procedures are being sidestepped at every turn.

Senior civil servants have begun refusing to appear before committees, and many bills go straight to the Dáil without being properly vetted, something that President Higgins has drawn attention to and complained about, which politicians should act on.

However, too many politicians have accepted their role as powerless scapegoats. 

Senior civil servants, well-remunerated for the work they do, cannot be named, shamed, or blamed for the advice they give, or the projects they manage. That’s what ministers are there for! 

How ridiculous is that in this day and age? Highly-paid and pensioned civil and public servants are unlike anyone else in employment in our country — they are faceless and blameless. Ministers, who are paid less and dependant on civil service advice, are responsible.

That is not good governance. It is neither sensible, transparent, nor accountable. It has to stop, which should start with the reform of the 1924 Ministers and Secretaries Act which allows it. Our country cannot continue to bear the cost of what is now a huge impediment to speedy progress and effective management of our country.

Secretary general at the Department of Health Robert Watt. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins
Secretary general at the Department of Health Robert Watt. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins

A few months ago, in the midst of a pandemic, one senior civil servant and the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, agreed between them that Robert Watt would get an €81,000+ pension increase, bringing his salary to €294,290, plus pension. This was way beyond current civil service pay scales. In the UK, prime minister Boris Johnson gets £161,401 (€193,838) and will lead to a cascade of parity demands. It’s absolutely unacceptable that this just went through on the nod.

Imagine the outcry if a politician had been the recipient of such munificence without a public discussion? Imagine the outrage at the effrontery of it?

Imagine the demands for an inquiry, and the anger that a refusal to engage and co-operate with it would generate in the media? The politician would likely lose his increase, and his seat. That simply does not happen in the civil service. 

In this case, an inquiry was arranged, which got little or no co-operation from the politicians and senior civil servants involved. Largely, a joint sitting of two of the most important committees in our national parliament was told by the secretary general, who did not appear, to bugger off.

Nothing to explain or see here, lads. Other witnesses, including the Taoiseach, were less than helpful. And that was that, in the middle of a pandemic, with the country on its knees.

Often now, hapless politicians are subject to criticism and opprobrium for the sins of the civil and public service: Grace, plus 47 physically and mentally challenged children in State care abused for years; the Children’s Hospital debacle, where the Department of Health is refusing to publish a report or a new budget; the scandal of millions upon millions being paid on courthouse steps to pay off those few whistleblowers, such as Maurice McCabe, who had the mental strength to fight, leaving those the State has beaten into silence to suffer on. 

It’s just not good enough. The civil and public service needs a more proactive, efficient, accountable, and transparent mindset.

The country deserves better than a 100-year-old engine with poor acceleration, whose clutch is stuck. 

Politics is essential in a democracy, and its strongest pillar. A country goes nowhere if its public and civil service simply mark time, and where it gets to when its national parliament has been sidelined should be a cause for concern.

  • John McGuinness is a Fianna Fáil TD for Carlow-Kilkenny and is chairman of the Oireachtas finance committee

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