You know that ho ho ho you’re hearing? Of course, it’s coming from Santa. The word is that he heard about the Oireachtas bicycle shed and is in stitches that a thing without walls, doors or windows, designed to shelter the relatively few bikes belonging to TDs and senators could cost hundreds of thousands. 

Sure, what could any of us do other than laugh?

Maybe it’s the small footprint of the bike shed that makes it permissible to snigger about the money issue, whereas the cost of the new children’s hospital would wipe the smile off the face of the most good-humoured among us.

And they’re just the most recent examples of the State mismanaging the money it gets from us, the taxpayers. 

Nobody would suggest that we don’t have bureaucracy. We’re up to our ears in it. If you want to build even something as ostensibly simple as a bike shed, tender procedures click into place and must be relied on.

Our reliance on bureaucratic procedures as a comfort blanket needs serious looking at. 

One of the unacknowledged complications of public tendering is that government departments and public bodies want value for money. 

Of course, they do. The problem is that “value for money”, as a concept run through the tender process liquidiser, tends to come out the other end as “cheapest.” 

This is seen as one of the factors that got the Peter McVerry Trust into such trouble. 

Other housing providers see the trust as invariably having gone for the lowest price when tendering for public work. 

This endeared them to the state bodies seeking the work, squeezed out the competition, and allowed them to win so often that they became, not necessarily too big to fail, but indubitably too busy to be allowed to fail. 

The point being that cheapest does not equate to best value. 

But in the weighting systems governing state body purchases, the two are often seen that way.

Governments and government leaders regularly make noises about cutting out waste and misuse of public money. 

It’s interesting, though, how low the bar is set. 

Take Leo Varadkar, who was going to stop bad guys ripping off the social welfare system. Which, admittedly, happens. 

But compare what might be saved as a result of a review into those supposedly ripping off the system with the money wasted on the national children’s hospital, and the impression is left that the big guys are impregnable but the little crooks at pickpocket level are the ones who get chased after. Which is strange, really, because we expect our governments to think and operate at a higher strategic level than the rest of us. 

It’s the difference between state economics and boot economics.

The late Terry Pratchett articulated boot economics in Men at Arms, one of his series of Discworld novels. Pratchett’s character Sam Vines figures that the reason the rich are so rich is because, paradoxically, they manage to spend less money:

“Take boots for example. He earned $38 a month. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10. Those were the kind of boots Vines always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.” 

With the $50 boots, Vimes knew that he would save money in the long term and that his feet would be dry for many years, but lacking the money for that initial outlay he’s caught in the trap of spending more money over the years, and a significantly longer time with wet feet.

We expect governments to operate like the rich guy who can afford the more cost-effective outlay on good boots, rather than faffing around making decisions that seem closer to the non-strategic and much more costly approach of the poor guy who can’t get ahead of the purchase price of good quality.

However, that’s not what we’ve seen when it comes to security huts, bike sheds and the not-so-small matter of the new children’s hospital.

We, the voters, would need to be clear on how precisely a new department of infrastructure would solve this problem, and what guarantee we’d get that it would not simply become another layer of ineffective bureaucracy. 

It’s a perennial promise from politicians that they will streamline everything, reduce paperwork and create systems that are so efficient and effective that they make being a small business operator a positive pleasure, rather than a form-filling nightmare.

It’s a promise that’s rarely delivered on, and nobody’s ever held accountable. 

Let’s be clear: The theatrics of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), where public and civil servants get harangued by committee members hungering after a headline, do not amount to accountability. 

Wounds get licked and the person harangued goes back to their job with precisely the same salary, pension and titular entitlements as they had before the drubbing.

This is serious, though. Much more serious than performative PAC procedures. 

The ordinary citizen understands Euros in hundreds and thousands. They have to. Those figures are familiar because of daily necessary expenditures. They even understand millions. It’s when you get up into the billions and trillions that the citizen, the voter, is disqualified from understanding.

That said, nobody can disqualify the ordinary citizen from the sense of being ripped off by elites who play in a different league, funded by taxpayers’ money. 

That sense of being ripped off leads to a profound mistrust of Government, and more importantly, of democracy itself. 

That’s the real danger to democracy, not headbanging rightwingers demonstrating in the street.

And that’s why you, the new Government, whatever your constituent parties, must radically change how our money is spent, and satisfy us you’ve gotten a grip on high-level money-wasting.