The future is forever disregarded

One of the great cliches of political journalism is the notion that governments are thrown off course by, in the words of Harold Macmillan, "events, dear boy, events". The implication is that political crises arise from unpredictable occurrences. In fact, almost every mess that our Government gets itself into is not just predictable, but has actually been predicted.

All the recent disasters have this character. The contamination of Galway's water supply from Lough Corrib was detailed by Roderick O'Sullivan 11 years ago in his report Lough Corrib: A Cause for Concern. The appalling problems in breast cancer testing and treatment arise directly from the failure to implement the report of Prof Niall O'Higgins, supposedly adopted as government policy seven years ago. The ending of Aer Lingus's Shannon to Heathrow service is an entirely predictable consequence of the Government's own decision to privatise the airline.

The crisis in primary school accommodation, and the sudden realisation that a diverse society poses challenges for our long-outmoded system of educational provision, is perhaps the best illustration of the reality that we don't have governments, just a perpetual crisis-management agency. The spin put on the story is that the lack of school places arises in particular from the unforeseeable vagaries of immigration. This is completely untrue. Pluralism and diversity were obvious issues even before large-scale immigration became a factor. The 1995 White Paper on education, for example, cites the "additional challenge" of "the growing plurality of Irish society". Civic initiatives like Educate Together have been trying to respond to this challenge for decades now. The problem is that neither government nor the Civil Service has been up to the job.

Seven years ago, the former general secretary of the Department of Finance Seán Cromien wrote an official report on the functioning, or rather the dysfunctionality, of the Department of Education. It was scathing, especially in relation to the core issue of forward planning. He painted a picture of a department bogged down in day-to-day minutiae and incapable of thinking about the future. Its most obvious characteristic was that it was "overwhelmed with detailed day-to-day work which has to be given priority over long-term strategic thinking. It is one in which, as a member of senior management expressed it, 'the urgent drives out the important'."

The Cromien report is a rare but shocking glimpse into the workings of government. It shows schools on the ground trying to deal with an unwieldy and remote bureaucracy. They respond by getting local TDs to put down parliamentary questions about broken windows and blocked drains. The civil servants run around responding to the questions. Meanwhile, Ministers announce initiatives that take the civil servants by surprise and whose implications are unknown.

"Many of the problems," wrote Cromien, "come from a lack of adequate planning. Policy evolves haphazardly. Much of the department's involvement in areas such as general educational provision, special education and social disadvantage has grown by often unrelated increments so that the department ends up by operating a multiplicity of schemes with similar objectives, requiring multiple payments and multiple evaluations . . . Because of day to day pressures in sections, not enough time is given to standing back from the work and assessing where the Department of Education and Science is going and what are its medium-term plans for education . . . Sections are too busy keeping up with the current workload to challenge whether what they are doing is being done properly or, indeed, whether it is worth doing at all."

Seán Cromien suggested radical reforms, including the regionalisation of the department's services and the hiving-off of specific functions to dedicated agencies. Some of this has been done, but it is notable that in its most recent annual report, the department still sets as one of its future objectives the creation of "a greater capacity within the department to concentrate on our core functions, especially that of strategic planning". Thinking about the future is still a goal for the future.

It is too easy to blame faceless bureaucrats for this. The ultimate source of the problem is political. To take one small example, Cromien identified decentralisation as one of the department's problems, with some officers "spending very significant amounts of their time in transit between the Athlone and Tullamore offices and head office". The Government's response has been, of course, more decentralisation.

More fundamentally, though, the need for new educational structures has been highlighted since 1994, when John Coolahan published the report of the National Convention on Education. That report, and the White Paper that followed it in 1995, made detailed proposals for a new system of local education boards. These boards would own the local schools and lease them out to different patron groups to provide as much diversity of choice as possible. They would also "continually evaluate school accommodation needs" in the area. None of it happened, of course, and none of it will happen so long as the future remains a vague realm in which failures will be forgotten and smugness will be rewarded.