An Irishman’s Diary on paperwork and bureaucracy

About three decades ago I attended a conference where a very learned speaker unequivocally announced the death of bureaucracy. Within 20 years people would once again be sovereign – freed from petty rules, paper trails, repetitive tasks and inflexible workplaces. A computer would stand alone on every desk, not a single ream of paper would infest any office and filing cabinets would be consigned, with telex machines, to museums of 20th-century memorabilia. Our lives would be simplified so much by information technology, he confidently predicted, we would simultaneously be both more productive and less stressed. Managing leisure would be our biggest challenge as we enjoyed the relaxing fruits of a three-day working week.

Desktop computers duly arrived, as predicted, to squat immovably in all our lives, but despite their undoubted labour-saving potential, our workplaces have, if anything, become more cluttered and our workloads increasingly onerous. So as I write this on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I can’t help wondering wistfully what became of the promised working week that supposedly ended on Wednesday.

And as for the paperless office – not only did it fail to materialise – our entire lives now seems drowned in an unstoppable tsunami of paper. Gazing at the grim mountain of files awaiting attention on the top of my overflowing filing cabinet reminds me that wherever we live, whatever we do and wherever we come from, there is no escape. We are all now under attack from the same direction – an invading army of forms to formalise, reviews to review and reports to report on urgently.

Small wonder that the equatorial rainforests are disappearing at an unprecedented rate considering the number of pages that are now gobbled to accomplish almost every task.

A school principal recently warned that a huge surge in the volume of directives and circulars avalanching out from the Department of Education is putting the teaching profession in danger of strangulation from red tape. In my local education college, two printers work on an almost full-time basis to sate the appetite for hard-copy evidence of educational accomplishment.

No matter what we do, there inevitably seems to be a form required to confirm what we did, then another to certify in triplicate we filled in the first one. In this world, somebody, somewhere, always wants more information about where we are, what we are doing and how and why we are doing it.

Everything seems predicated on a suspicious belief that no one will work honestly unless required to constantly prove in writing that they are doing their job. In hospitals I see nurses spending precious hours in form-filling – writing, I guess, about what they would do for patients if they only had the time – then sincerely apologising for a consequent lack of bedside interaction. Doctors are forced to immediately write up case records as patients wait around them on trolleys. Other people seem to be employed full time in transporting files between hospital departments in what appear like overflowing shopping trollies. Then when recently visiting my local health centre, I saw into a room that once served as a small canteen; it was now stacked ceiling high with files.

Then there is the Garda vetting process, where those involved with more than one organisation have to go through the entire process for each, which results in the same application being processed several times.

At the risk of being considered uncaring, I admit that in choosing my children’s schools, I failed to question if all the staff possessed a piece of paper showing Garda vetting. Somehow, it never seemed to come up as I discussed ethos, sense of community and teaching quality with the principal. And call me old fashioned, but in hospital I would prefer bedside manner and rapid diagnosis to a facility for navigating paperwork.

It’s unstoppable, of course. We cannot turn back the tide. Bureaucracy is here to stay for too much of the status quo depends on it. So dutifully, I will continue to complete 10-page documents for government departments requiring exactly the same information as I filled in last year. I will accept that somewhere faceless people know about that Chinese takeaway I ordered last Tuesday. I will obediently fill in the required forms for my water bill and household charge on time. But somewhere deep down there still lurks a rebel heart, for I cannot help harbouring a sneaking admiration for those who refuse to conform so easily.