Madam, - It is surprising that, although much has been written, since the start of the present crisis, about the Minister of Finance, the banks, and the inscrutable global markets, so little has been said about the people who actually run the country.
The Irish civil service, like all such, works on the basis of precedent. In times of uncertainty, guidance is sought in that which has been done before. The ethos and thinking of the Irish administration has been moulded over the centuries.
In particular, three features of its conceptual framework seem to me to be striking in the present climate:
(a) The idea that money must always be saved and that in times of crisis retrenchment is the only answer. Ireland has always been "an expense" (since 1922 this principle has been rationalised as "being careful with the taxpayers' money");
(b) The long-accepted advisability of making most if not all of these savings at the expense of the Irish people themselves, particularly those outside the ambit of power - the old, the very young, and the less able being the obvious choices.
(c) The all-embracing concept of the absolute primacy of the English language (in large part the vehicle of the tradition) and the unthinking indifference of this monoglot culture to the existence, not to mention the needs, of the Irish language. The cutbacks on Údarás na Gaeltachta, for example, seem to be considerably larger than those on comparable English-language organisations.
It would be wrong to blame any individual civil servant, or group of civil servants, for an ethos that has been centuries in the making.
Indeed, I am certain that many are using their considerable intellectual talents, even as I write, to try to solve the country's problems and to temper their solutions with humanity.
It is ironic, however, that the British administration, from which ours derives, is currently adopting a very different strategy from ours. But then it has always been accepted that traditions survive longest on the periphery. - Yours, etc,