Paul Hosford: Why has the State been sitting on the Mulcahy Report for six years?

If you’re not familiar with the story (most people outside of the North West aren’t) the basics go something like this. In 2010, a whistleblower named Gerard Convie alleged that were severe irregularities in Donegal County Council’s planning department in the early 2000s.

The Gerard Convie dossier

Mr Convie had presented a dossier of 20 sample cases to the government in 2010, prompting then Green Party environment minister, John Gormley, to launch an independent review. 

That review was nixed by Mr Gormley’s successor Phil Hogan and an internal review ordered instead. That review concluded there was no evidence of irregularities and questioned Mr Convie’s motive in making the claims.

Mr Convie challenged that review in the High Court. In 2013, the Department of Environment had to withdraw the review, overturn the findings, and apologise to Mr Convie.

Senior counsel Rory Mulcahy was appointed in 2015 to conduct a review into the allegations and produced the final document in 2017, which has sat on the desks of three ministers since but has never seen the light of day.

Every year, in and around the anniversary of the finalisation of the document, some journalists (with the Irish Examiner and other papers) and some TDs — most notably Green TD Patrick Costello and Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin — raise the issue, and then it fades away again.

For its part, the Department of Housing says the minister, Darragh O’Brien, will “bring the report to Government in due course”.

It said “careful consideration” is being given to the report by Mr Mulcahy and that, as the report was a scoping review, Mr Mulcahy “did not form any conclusion as to the truth or otherwise of those allegations in his report”, which are unproven.

To some, the affair is a quirk. A curio of Irish life or a case of a sole man’s railing against city hall. Who knows and who cares?

But, to others, it is an example of a deeply Irish sclerosis. The kind of stasis that can grip an entire state when making no decision is always the best call because no decision can’t be the wrong decision. Which leads to reports and reviews and quangos galore.

Every time there is a problem, or a scandal, or a fiasco, or a ‘Gate’, there is a seemingly irresistible urge to kick the can as far down the road as humanly possible because dealing with a problem should be done by someone else at a later date. Governance by good vibes only?

Analysis or paralysis?

There is a lot to be said for being well-informed, being considered, having all of the facts, especially with the stakes and finances often involved. But there is also a lot to be said for action.

And, to be abundantly clear, this is not an anti-civil servant screed by any measure. In fact, this writer wholeheartedly agrees with Eamon Ryan who in April repeated his argument for an expanded civil service.

Mr Ryan said: “One of the issues is, how long does it take to do things? If we can improve our systems and quicken things up, then you don’t need as many public servants. But it takes us about 10 years to get a bus lane — and it takes us 20 years to get a rail line built.

“If we could shorten some of those timelines and make sure that our planning and legal system doesn’t require so many hurdles, whereby you have this huge staff tied up, then we can get a better return without having to increase the numbers everywhere. But we do need a larger public service.”

Some of the Green Party leader’s argument is basic common sense — as the population grows, so too will demand for public services. But some of it is a question of ambition, about where we want to be and what kind of country we want to build.

Good public service...

Right now in Ireland, there are few things that the general public would say work well. Passport applications have bounced back from a covid-induced month in the headlines and are turned around quickly now; the standard of care within the health service is fantastic and outcomes are improving; and An Post workers are regularly praised for going above and beyond.

...and not so good

But, generally speaking, levels of satisfaction with the apparatus of the State are low. All the while, it seems, navigating Irish officialdom has become either more complex or more onerous as departmental responsibilities are carved out into standalone watchdogs or NGOs or quangos, many of which are hamstrung by their own limited capacity or end up being asked to take on huge workloads without the necessary resources.

In adding initials to different sectors, however, the morass seems to grow while the capacity for speedy decision-making does not.

The RTÉ example  

Take the RTÉ debacle for example. The future of the broadcaster had been debated and discussed by the Future of Media Commission, whose report was nearly two years in the making.

Before the commission could get to grips with its remit, the news broke of top-up payments to Ryan Tubridy and RTÉ’s entire existence, ethos, and funding became a political issue.

Now it is subject to three external reports, two Government-ordered, and a forensic accounting overview.

The tendering for the expert reviews has not been completed and, when it is, the process is expected to take around six months, meaning that it will be 2024 before any report is sent to Media Minister Catherine Martin, who will have at most a year before the next general election.

Does anybody truly believe that RTÉ will emerge from the last few months an entirely different organisation? Or will the penchant to report, review, and revise mean little more than cosmetic changes due to a frustrated and piecemeal process?

Swift action

In Ireland, however, we have seen that the State can move fast, can make decisions and rectify mistakes at pace when it needs to. The responses to covid and the early days of the Ukraine war show just what can be done.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner this week, Mr Costello said it was “bizarre” that any government-ordered report would sit on a desk for six years. He said that if the Government was worried about the contents of the document, it should be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

In short, he was pleading for something to be done, a decision to be made.

Because the fate of this report and the kinds of stasis felt across the country are just different names for the same thing.