A phrase uttered by a Department of Education official and quoted in a damning internal report this week sums up the administration of contemporary Ireland: "The urgent drives out the important." In other words, officials and their political masters devote so much time to crisis management that they never get around to doing their jobs properly. If that seems like an excessively harsh conclusion, two things must be borne in mind.

In the first place, the report in question is the work, not of a cynical outsider, but of a pillar of the system. It was written by one of the State's most respected civil servants, the former secretary of the Department of Finance, Sean Cromien.

Secondly, ample supporting evidence was supplied from two other sources. The Moriarty tribunal heard that another key State institution, the Central Bank, failed to act on a junior official's suspicions that something very strange was going on at Des Traynor's Guinness and Mahon bank. And the Dail finally received a copy of a report on the use of children in industrial schools and homes as guinea pigs for vaccination trials which raised fundamental questions about the operation of the Department of Health.

Each of these revelations, moreover, was entirely consistent with what was already known. The failure of the Central Bank to follow a trail that ought to have led all the way to the notorious Ansbacher scam had a familiar ring to anyone who followed the evidence at the Public Accounts Committee hearings on the DIRT scandal. The inability of the Department of Health to enforce some of the most basic laws on medical safety echoes similar failures highlighted by the Finlay inquiry into the infection of hundreds of women with hepatitis C.

What all of these different stories have in common is the failure, not just of individuals, but of whole systems of public administration. The consequences range from the mild comedy of Yes, Minister-style bureaucratic absurdity to the deep tragedy of blighted lives and premature deaths. But together they contradict the long-cherished assumption that whatever the foibles of transient politicians, the permanent government of the public service was solid, reliable and competent.

What makes all of this even worse is that the problem is not rooted in the failings of inept individuals. On the contrary, because of the absence until very recently of attractive employment opportunities elsewhere the Civil Service has traditionally attracted officials of a remarkably high quality. Though there are lazy, incompetent and even corrupt people in the public service, the vast majority of officials are intelligent, well-meaning and honest. Yet, somehow, some of the most basic things simply don't get done.

In the case of the vaccination trials, nearly 200 children in care in Dublin, Cork and the midlands were used in tests for the multinational drugs company Wellcome in the 1960s and 1970s. The Department of Health had many legal obligations in relation to such trials, some of them dating back to the Therapeutic Substances Act of 1932, which controls the manufacture, sale and import of "vaccines, sera, toxins, antitoxins and antigens". At the very least, the importation of vaccines for clinical trials by Wellcome ought to have generated a substantial paper trail.

Yet, in the Department for Health report released on Thursday, the Chief Medical Officer could not confirm the legality of the trials, as documentation detailing whether consent had been given could not be found. As the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, told the Dail, "the most rigorous interrogation of the system failed to produce documentary records of the trials". This lack of documentation is, as the Minister put it "at best puzzling". But it strongly suggests that there was virtually no supervision by the Department itself.

This is all the more extraordinary because at least one of the institutions in which the trials took place was run directly by the Department of Health. In a home in Bessboro, Co Cork, 78 children aged less than one year were vaccinated as part of an experiment. When this was first revealed last April, a spokesman for the Southern Health Board told The Irish Times that "during that time Bessboro was operated directly by the Department of Health". Even this direct responsibility does not seem to have produced the very first thing that would be expected from a properly functioning bureaucracy - a detailed and comprehensive file on what was or was not done at the home.

For those tempted to take comfort in the fact that all of this happened in the bad old days of the 1960s and the 1970s, Sean Cromien's report on the Department of Education in 2000 makes especially depressing reading. The only consolation it offers is evidence that the Department's officials at least know how bad thing are. He reports that "there is a feeling at every level that something is seriously amiss with the structure of the Department".

That may be an understatement, for the picture that emerges is such that, had Sonia O'Sullivan and Tom Humphries not stolen the title for their recent book, the report might be called Running to Stand Still. Sean Cromien found officials so "overwhelmed with detailed day-to-day work" that they don't have time to think about whether this work is worth doing or, if it is, whether it is being done well.

The worst news is not that the officials don't get to think about policy, but they don't even know whose job it is to think about policy: "There is a vagueness about where in the Department policy is formulated and whose responsibility it is to formulate it." As a result, senior officials who should be thinking about, for example, appalling levels of illiteracy or of provision for children with special needs, end up trying to get someone to fix a broken window in a primary school in Sneem.

This, remember, is the situation after many decades in which the public service was able to attract the brightest and the best. What, one has to ask, will it be like when a bureaucracy that is already having difficulty recruiting and holding on to high-flyers, has to manage an ever more complex society? And when more and more talented people within the Civil Service get so frustrated from working hard and achieving nothing more than keeping this week's crisis off the Minister's desk that they opt for an easier and more lucrative life in the private sector?

The one hopeful sign is that the problems are now becoming too obvious to ignore. Sean Cromien's report was commissioned by the Department of Education itself. The Chief Medical Officer's report is being sent to the Laffoy Commission, which will try to fill in the gaping holes in the record.

Even the Central Bank responded to the embarrassing evidence at the Moriarty tribunal this week with an unusually vigorous media campaign aimed at showing a tough response to another alleged scam. These explicit and tacit acknowledgements of the awkward truth could be the first step towards real reform.

Public pressure and political leadership could turn that first step into what is now needed - a race against time to rescue the public service.

fotoole@irish-times.ie