Fintan O’Toole: Welcome to ‘The Paddysucker Proxy’

The movie that runs on a loop in Official Ireland might be called The Story of O. Or perhaps The Paddysucker Proxy, after the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy. Tim Robbins plays a guy who works in the mail room of a big corporation. He keeps trying to get the men in suits to look at his great new design idea. When they finally agree to see it, it is a piece of paper with nothing on it except a large O. (It is actually the prototype for the hula-hoop.)

The Paddysucker Proxy would have a similar scene. The men in suits are panicking about the latest threatened scandal. What shall we do – hold another inquiry? And a big lunk of a naively enthusiastic junior clerk seizes his chance and comes up to them with his prototype answer for all Irish scandals: a sheet of paper with a big O on it. The geometry of the Irish scandal is the perfect circle. We could save ourselves a lot of fuss and a golden avalanche of legal fees. Every time the system is forced to look like it cares about the bad smell in the room, the State just issues a report with a new title on the front, a back cover and nothing in between except a page with a circle on it. We can tell already that's what any proper report on the Siteserv affair would amount to.

Siteserv and the triumph of circularity

There is no evidence of corruption on anyone’s part in the sale of Siteserv to Denis O’Brien with the taxpayer writing off €110 million. It illustrates, rather, the triumph of circularity – the feedback loop of groupthink. We have the law firm Arthur Cox (the nearest thing to God left in Ireland, since it is everywhere and the State thinks it knows all things) acting for both the buyer (Denis O’Brien) and the seller (in effect the rest of us). Arthur Cox thus had a corporate interest in ensuring there was no dispute in the sale – if a dispute had arisen, it would have had to step back from representing O’Brien.

And now we have two senior (and highly respected) figures from KPMG investigating on our behalf this and other transactions for which KPMG itself acted as an adviser. It’s public policy as a 1960s freak-out song: a circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel. But those circles aren’t just in the windmills of your mind – they’re in the boardrooms of your State.

The circles stay unbroken because political accountability is so pitifully weak. Thanks to Catherine Murphy’s persistence as a genuine public representative, Siteserv has become a big issue. But only after the deadening political obfuscation designed to keep democracy well away from the important work of deal-making has ensured that it’s all too late.

We now know the Department of Finance had deep anxieties about the sale. But did Michael Noonan tell this to the Dáil when he was asked? It is worth comparing his answers to two Dáil questions, the first from Pearse Doherty in April 2012, the second from Catherine Murphy last December. They are, almost word for word, the same. And they reveal absolutely nothing about his department’s concerns. He didn’t even bother to dress up the old blather as new blather. And most of the same stock answer was repeated yet again when Murphy specifically asked Noonan last February whether his department “endeavoured to query” the massive write-down on the Siteserv sale. The only new bone thrown to her by Noonan was that “my officials did take an active interest in the running of the bank”, a formula so laconic and opaque it makes the Oracle of Delphi sound like Oprah. The contempt for any notion that citizens should know what’s happening to their money is as casual as it is complete.

This vacuum of accountability is created by the failures of the political system, not by professionals. But it is filled by the teeming tribe of corporate lawyers, accountancy firms, stockbrokers, property wranglers, all-purpose consultants and media handlers that dominates those parts of public life our governments prefer not to be too public about.

Random coincidences

The bodies tasked with protecting the “public interest” are represented by a nice (and very expensive) chap who sits across the table from another nice (and equally expensive) chap who is so like him that, gosh, they find they actually work for the same firm. How they must shake their heads in disbelief at the funny ways of a world that throws up so many random coincidences. Going to work for these guys (and maybe the occasional girl) must be like those weird times for the rest of us when you climb a remote mountain and find the only other person at the top is someone you went to school with.

We know that the culture of groupthink that comes from this world gave us the disaster we are still living with. But how much interest does the establishment have in changing it? A big fat O.