Next-gen politicians should study how Richard Bruton worked the levers of power

Richard Bruton’s announcement this week that he will step down at the next election does not come as a surprise around Leinster House: 41 years as a TD is probably enough for anyone. You can read his thoughts (and some of mine) on his long, varied and productive career in an interview here. But there’s one aspect of his legacy that’s worth thinking about in more detail – his time as minister for enterprise and employment during the period of austerity and economic recovery that followed the economic crash of 2008-11.

By the time the Fine Gael-Labour coalition took office in 2011, there were more than half a million people, or 15 per cent of the workforce, unemployed. Young people were worst hit, and emigration soared.

But these were also, many of them, people no longer in the first flush of youth, but who had acquired mortgages, families and responsibilities during the long years of the boom. Now they were pitched into a new and frightening world, dominated by the absence of a salary to pay for the lives they had constructed. Going to Australia and waiting out the recession in the sunshine wasn’t an option for them. For an awful lot of people, catastrophe loomed. Sometimes we are inclined to think of the great crash in purely economic or political terms. But it was first and foremost a personal disaster for hundreds of thousands of Irish people.

Bruton entered his department at a time when the Irish government was in a programme supervised by the Troika, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These bodies provided the bailout funds necessary to keep the Irish government functioning at a time when it couldn’t borrow any more money on the international markets.

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In return for those funds – necessary to keep paying pensions, public sector wages, all those weekly dole payments and, yes, the cost of bailing out the banks – the Troika insisted on supervising nearly every aspect of government to ensure that the requisite spending cuts were made, the necessary reforms implemented and the terms of the bailout loans were complied with. The programme plan itself was broken down into hundreds of individual actions to be taken by the government, each of which was given an individual deadline. Quarterly reviews monitored progress relentlessly. There was no escape from the all-seeing gaze of the Troika.

[ Richard Bruton: four decades in politics but few enemies, despite heave against Enda Kenny’s leadership ]

And it worked – but at a fearful price in social terms. There is now general agreement among international policymakers that the policies of austerity implemented to correct the public finances and facilitate economic recovery were not the best way to go about the task. An approach that entailed more upfront borrowing, fewer immediate expenditure cuts and minimal social scarring would have been better, they say now – a lesson that found its expression in the approach to the pandemic.

But what is often unappreciated is just how little option the then government had – it could accept the bailout terms, or it could default. If it took the latter option, it would have had to finance itself from day one. The wealth destruction, the social and economic upheaval would have been enormous. Maybe that would have had a better outcome than the slow grind of austerity. I doubt it.

But leave that argument aside. Bruton watched the approach of the Troika and saw how they had managed – by breaking down policy implementation into thousands of small steps with achievable deadlines – to direct the great machine of government according to its will. He sought to mirror the approach when he produced his plan to tackle unemployment – the action plan for jobs. Hundreds of actions, realistic timelines, regular reviews – and a transparency that many officials hated, but which ensured that the plan was applied.

[ Richard Bruton: ‘Politics is much more about emotion than about evaluating evidence’ ]

It’s impossible to say how many jobs were created by the plan; cause and effect are not exactly clear. All you can say is that at the time of its operation, it set itself the target of 100,000 jobs by 2016; that target was reached two years early. Since then, the economy has added a further 650,000 jobs. The jobs recovery was led by multinationals and exporters. What Bruton’s approach did was advertise to the potential job creators that the government had the intent, capacity and grip to bend the bureaucracy to its will, to drive through policy and operational reforms. That helped to make the climate ripe for investment, changing a doom-loop into a virtuous circle.

The jobs plan benefited from another crucial element: though run by Bruton’s department, it had the imprimatur and authority of the Taoiseach’s Department behind it. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development observed that the plan’s “most striking innovation . . . is a co-ordination mechanism that ensures high-level political buy-in and oversight, whole-of-government engagement and the establishment of quarterly targets underpinned by a robust monitoring system. These are important steps towards addressing long-standing gaps that undermine successful policy implementation”.

[ Fintan O'Toole: Sinn Féin has what might benignly be characterised as deep ambivalence towards the State ]

Every politician who warbles about change during an election campaign needs to understand how difficult it is to get the system to actually do it. Bureaucracies tend towards inertia; they need to be constantly prodded to change. This is of especial relevance to Sinn Féin, as that party contemplates the challenges of potential office. As Aoife Moore’s just-published book on the party, The Long Game, attests, that party was good at controlling its own organisation when the powersharing administration was formed in Northern Ireland, but hopeless at controlling Government.

There is no more important task for parties who enter government with a policy agenda than figuring out how to get the great machine of government to implement their plans. Those who don’t realise this are already doomed to fail. Those who are smart enough to understand it could do a lot worse than study how Bruton learned to work the levers of power.