Ceann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl began the first day of the new Dáil term by publicly distancing politicians from the Selling Sunset bike shed, to relief all round – presumably including his own. It later turned out that a cheaper location for the €336,000 edifice had been rejected by a committee composed largely of politicians, and which happens to be chaired by Ó Fearghaíl.
Now cross-party unanimity has broken out as politicians of all hues clamber to distance themselves from these overspending fiascos: the children’s hospital whose costs are soaring like Jack’s beanstalk; the €1.429 million bronze-capped security hut; the revamped Members’ Library, which Michael McDowell has written about in these pages; reports of the recruitment of a €190,000 fitness instructor contract.
“Ridiculous,” Micheál Martin called the security hut, mistaking himself once again for a Liveline caller and not a man who has been rotating in and out of the top job for the past few years.
“A profound embarrassment,” said Ó Fearghaíl of the bike shed.
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Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe pointed out that neither he nor Minister of State for the Office of Public Works (OPW) Patrick O’Donovan “played any role in the decision on the bike shed. It was made at official level.”
“On your bikes,” said a gleeful Mattie McGrath.
Certainly senior politicians have better things to be doing than parsing every line on the builder’s estimate for a bike shelter on campus. That is presumably why it was left up to a cross-party committee, the Oireachtas Commission, to approve the broad plan in June 2021 with “no estimates or costings” attached. The commission clarified this week that it “has no role in relation to the approval of capital expenditure” and was not “advised at any stage of what we all now know to be excessive expenditure ... In very simple terms, the OPW is the landlord and we are the tenants.”
[ Tánaiste says €1.4m cost of Government Buildings security hut is ‘ridiculous’Opens in new window ]
Well, yes and no. The OPW may be the landlord and the Oireachtas the tenants – but the OPW is an office of government. And there is no escaping the awkward reality that all of this is being done in the furtherance of politicians’ comfort and convenience, or that the impressive profligacy came about as a result of “fatally flawed systems” for signing off on spending by the OPW.
The Government is also scrambling to lay the blame for the fiasco of the €2.2 billion children’s hospital at the feet of the builders, but somebody signed off on the original contract which seems to incentivise delays and over-spending. That contract was awarded in 2017, when Simon Harris was health minister.
It would be all too easy to lose the run of ourselves in a satisfying frenzy of outrage. A souped-up security hut is hardly Caligula erecting a life-size gold statue of himself in a temple in Rome and insisting it be dressed daily to match his own outfit. It’s not even Charlie Haughey smoothing his Charvet shirt as he chided the nation to tighten their belts. But none of it is a great look at a time when voters are wondering how much longer they can get away with it before they’ll have to put the heating on.
We have mostly stopped talking about the “cost of living crisis” in recognition of the fact that this is no longer a passing crisis, but a grim new reality – although it’s not equally grim for everyone. As Tom McDonnell of the Nevin Institute pointed out this week, this is now an economy of winners and losers. Thanks to the Apple billions, we have more money than we know what to do with. And yet 17.3 per cent of people in Ireland were living in households experiencing two or more forms of deprivation in 2023. In this wealthy state, one in five children is living in deprivation.
In the grand scheme of things, what’s a copper-roofed security hut or even a gold-plated bike shed? In one sense, they’re just distractions, the kind of trivia that arguably take up too much space in newspapers. Appropriately, there is a term in software development called “bikeshedding”, borrowed from a theory invented by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the naval historian most famous for Parkinson’s law. That’s the one which states that work expands to fill the time allocated to it. His 1958 book also included a less-celebrated principle, the law of triviality, which says that the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organisation is inversely proportional to its actual importance.
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To illustrate it, he asked readers to imagine a finance committee which is tasked with signing off on a nuclear bunker, a coffee budget and – in a useful piece of serendipity if you’re a columnist writing about them – a bike shed. The committee would spend the least amount of time on the £10 million nuclear bunker, he suggested, because not many people have deeply held views on the best methods of construction for nuclear bunkers. They would spend far more time on the bike shed, on the basis that it’s not very difficult to visualise a cheap and useful bike shelter (well, as long as you’re not employed by the OPW) and most time on the coffee budget.
But in this case, the bike shed and the security hut are important because they are proxies for something else. Namely, a culture where accountability means looking for someone else to throw under the bus. An economy of winners and losers. And a political class that may include a very many good and principled people, but which, to the electorate, seems increasingly out of touch.
I once interviewed a very rich man and asked him what it felt like to have so much money. “At the risk of sounding like a total bollox,” he replied, “you kind of stop counting after the first 15 million.” It’s beginning to feel like the Government is blinded by the same affliction.