It's time for CIÉ to stop hiding its problems in plain sight

OPINION:CIÉ falls miserably short of the level of transparency that should be demanded by taxpayers, writes JOHN McMANUS

ON SEPTEMBER 2nd last, the board of CIÉ Group, the State transport company, signed off on its 2008 accounts. They didn’t make for terribly pleasant reading, but at the same time there was nothing very surprising about them.

It is pretty much accepted that CIÉ – like most public transport services – cannot operate without State support and it did not disappoint in 2008, when it received €321 million from the exchequer in the form of grants and payments in respect of public-service obligations.

The only shocker was that the deficit in the company’s pension scheme had shot from €163 million to €568 million, reflecting a fall in the value of the assets underlying the scheme. But even that is not surprising given the events of 2008.

What is surprising is that you would be blissfully unaware of this, or any of the details of CIÉ’s financial performance, unless someone brought it to your attention that the 2008 accounts for CIÉ and its subsidiaries are now available on the group website. How long they have been available is not clear.

While CIÉ cannot be accused of failing to account for how it spends taxpayers’ money, it is not exactly going to any great lengths to let taxpayers know what it has done with it.

It is understandable but not really excusable. There is little from a corporate point of view to be gained by CIÉ from hanging its dirty washing out to dry. And the nature of the business means the washing is inevitably dirty, given the extent to which public transport and railways in particular require subvention.

All three of the CIÉ operating companies – Iarnród Éireann, Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus – had big operating deficits (CIÉ-speak for losses, presumably) in 2008.

Iarnród Éireann lost €307 million, Bus Éireann lost €49 million and Dublin Bus lost €104 million. These were offset by operating grants of €84 million, €42 million and €86 million respectively, and an infrastructure grant of €216 million to Iarnród Éireann.

Net staff costs at the group rose by about 5 per cent to €615 million – or almost 80 per cent all revenues before State grants – while the average number of people employed rose by about 150 to 11,848.

The average wage was about €50,000.

CIÉ would simply be mad to publish these figures if it had any way of avoiding doing so. It doesn’t, but policy appears to be to publish them as late as possible and as quietly as possible. It is more a case of hiding in plain sight.

But even so, a cursory glance at the 2008 figures – some 12 months on – is pretty much all you need to paint a picture of CIÉ as a bloated, inefficiently run State monopoly whose primary function appears to be to pay the wages of its feather-bedded staff.

Such a characterisation would, of course, chime nicely with the public perception of public transport organisations the world over.

But is it justified? Frankly, we don’t know, because we don’t really know what is going on at CIÉ.

The company’s success in keeping its financial performance under the radar for most of the last decade means there is little or no debate about whether the company offers value for money by any yardstick.

The Government, as the shareholders, appears to have been complicit. The CIÉ accounts had to be approved by it before they were half-heartedly released more than eight months after the year-end.

The Government has been content to allow the company

to consume large amounts of taxpayers’ money, without any real public oversight, as long as the trains and buses ran on time. This strategy of buying its way out of trouble would be in keeping with the political calculus of the former and current Taoiseach.

But things have changed. Pretty much every single element of public expenditure is now subject to scrutiny, while social welfare and other benefits paid to the most vulnerable in society are being cut.

The idea that the massive annual subsidy paid towards public transport should not be subjected to something similar is simply absurd.

CIÉ is clearly not blind to this and has apparently made significant efforts to cut its costs in 2009, with a figure of €36 million mentioned.

This a welcome development, but the manner in which it has entered the public domain – an unattributed and unconfirmed report in a newspaper – still falls miserably short of the level of transparency and accountability that should be demanded by taxpayers of a State company at any time.

In the current climate it is simply non-negotiable.