Rich pickings on the gravy train

GOVERNMENT: DAN O'BRIENreviews Wastersby Shane Ross and Nick Webb, Penguin Ireland, pp279. €16 .99

SCOURGE OF money men. Tormentor of trade unionists. Hounder of estate agents. Shane Ross has, with great relish, long played each of these roles in Irish life, and many more besides. From his perch in the Seanad and his pulpit at the Sunday Independentthe former stockbroker has shone a light into many of this country's stitched-up nooks. Their inhabitants don't like it much. At the spectrum ends of Irish society, from the fat cats in banks to the beards in trade unions, Ross is reviled for poking his patrician nose into their cosy affairs and heaping ridicule on them in his articles and at Oireachtas committee meetings.

His latest effort is written with his journalistic deputy, Nick Webb. In the Ross-Webb cross hairs are junketeers and expenses- fiddlers, profligates and squanderers, slush-funders and gravy-trainers; brown-envelope givers and takers. With so many snouts in so many troughs, the pickings for the pair are rich. They compile a long and sorry litany of instances of taxpayers’ money being mis-spent by politicians and others on the State’s payroll, many of which they themselves have unearthed.

Most depressing, to this reviewer at least, is the rotten state of Fás, the State training agency, which, through good times and bad, received €1 billion of taxpayers’ money annually. Ross and Webb, following a tip-off from an insider sickened by the abuses of those at the top of that organisation, broke the story that ultimately led to the ouster of the agency’s boss, Rody Molloy. Not, of course, that Molloy’s gross failings were penalised. On the contrary. The Tánaiste, in circumstances that are themselves scandalous, decided she would give Molloy almost €1 million of other people’s money as a parting gift.

But it is not just the gross abuse of expenses and the award of contracts worth hundreds of millions of euro to dubious private training providers that is depressing, and which the authors document comprehensively. A well-functioning training agency, operating along the lines of those in other European countries, could make a real contribution to easing the jobs crisis. Instead, Fás, among other things, continues to train builders who are destined to join tens of thousands of unemployed colleagues already on the dole. Fás does this because it employs people who train builders. The agency serves itself, not those it was created to serve.

CIÉ is little better. Run by a bureaucratic infighter, John Lynch, the company receives €300 million a year from taxpayers. Again, it was Ross and Webb, acting on information from another brave insider, who brought to light widespread wrongdoing at the organisation. An unpublished report, compiled by the accountancy firm Baker Tilly Ryan Glennon at a cost of almost €500,000, was passed to the pair. It reported “corruption, theft, kickbacks, bogus orders, manipulation of contracts and a host of other abuses”.

Not only was the report not made available to CIÉ’s board, but when Ross and Webb attempted to find out who was on the board even this information was obscured. Their initials and surnames were the only details available about its directors, who were supposed to guard the interests of shareholders – in CIÉ’s case, taxpayers. No CVs or biographical details of the board members were available. (CIÉ’s website still does not provide this information.) When the authors eventually unearthed more information on CIÉ’s directors they were found to be, almost to a man, very short on qualifications and very long on political contacts.

This is hardly exceptional, as the book details. It contains a potted history of the rise of semi-state agencies and companies over the decades. The authors map the growing scope for patronage that these entities created for successive governments. Boards have traditionally been packed with deadbeats and yes-men who are given directorships not because they could improve oversight of operations but as straightforward pay-offs from their respective parties. The authors devote an entire chapter to Bertie Ahern’s inglorious mastery of this patronage mechanism, from the placing of his former partner Celia Larkin on the board of the National Consumer Agency to his blunt admission to Brian Dobson on RTÉ news that he appointed people simply “because they were friends”. The Drumcondra Everyman was a good friend to have.

The book has flaws. One is the absence of any attempt to make sense of it all. There is little in the way of contextualisation or solutions. The result is a book that is a series of many unjoined dots. Fair enough, though. Ross and Webb are chroniclers. They never claim to be analysts or advocates.

A more serious criticism is the somewhat indiscriminate nature of the opprobrium dished out. The Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General is the State agency that audits the spending of taxpayers’ money. It may be sleepy, and its current head and his predecessor may not be superdynamic, but to include their modest expenses for attending meetings abroad gives the false appearance that they acted improperly, as did so many others who are rightly excoriated in the book.

The pair also criticise the agency for not preventing poor decisions at CIÉ and the National Stud that led to waste. Alas, the Comptroller and Auditor General has no such pre-emptive powers. Ross and Webb would have done better to have called for the beefing up of that office instead of tarring it with the brush used deftly on the likes of Fás and CIÉ.

Overall, the book does a service in highlighting glaring weaknesses in Irish public administration and the almost complete absence of consequence for those who are caught doing wrong. It will add to the momentum for real reform in the public sector.

Dan O’Brien is Economics Editor of

The Irish Times