The Cabinet will sit down on Tuesday to consider proposals from Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers on accelerating the delivery of infrastructure in our country. I hope they will reflect honestly on one of the main reasons for our slow delivery to date. The cause of our difficulties, more than anything else, has been the attitude and approach of his own department.
Anyone who has been close to our system will know about that department’s outlook and culture. It focuses on process more than outcomes. It is innately suspicious of anything sustainable, green or digital and it seems to consider procrastination a virtue, there to protect us from some wild public spending that would otherwise take hold.
We do need a department that looks after the public purse, but the balance in our system has been all wrong. Every other government department has to get agreement on new capital or current expenditure, under the public spending code. They know they are going into a tortuous approval process. As a Minister or official in another department, you are dealing with the most powerful department – which also decides salaries, oversees promotions and proudly yields a stamp that just says “no”.
The public think the Department of An Taoiseach is the most powerful in Government, but I’ve always found it significant that to get to that office you have to go through the gates of Government Buildings, which are overlooked on the one side by the Attorney General’s Office and on the other by the offices of the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Public Expenditure. They are the financial and legal watchdogs for the State who have a real say when it comes to deciding where we stand.
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This culture became more entrenched after the financial crash, perhaps because the same officials were kicking themselves for having let the financial guard down. The huge overruns in the children’s hospital contract then gave everyone cause to double down on a protracted public procurement process, which in the end costs us more because of all the delays.
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What happened to the MetroLink is an example of how this process fails us. The Department of Public Expenditure fought against the project, going right back to the late 1990s. The Department of Transport kept it alive because it was vital for the city. In our first term in government, the Green Party made sure it was included in the four-year plan, which was the agreed way out of the financial crash. By 2012 it had finally got through the planning process. It had also secured funding from the European Investment Bank and was at last ready to go – only for it to be killed at the altar of financial prudence, a decision that held back housing as well as transport for years.
That misplaced prudence has also undermined our planning system. At a time when everyone could see we were facing a large planning backlog, the Department of Public Expenditure held out against sanctioning additional legal and other staff posts in An Bord Pleanála when they were desperately needed. It was penny wise and pound foolish. The obsession with keeping the public headcount down cost us dearly again, but no one was going to be held to account for that mistake.
A third example of the misguided culture was when the department went all out to try to stop the National Broadband Plan, which was thankfully resisted by the then government. The timely delivery of that complex project subsequently disproved the cynical view that we can never build infrastructure projects on budget and on time.
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It is expected that Chambers will today unveil some 30 recommendations from the infrastructure taskforce that was established to suggest how we accelerate delivery. Those recommendations will not work if the system omits an acknowledgment of the underlying cause of our problems and fails to steer us on to a better course.
Chambers said last Sunday that “we need to increase the risk appetite in senior decision makers to accelerate delivery” – which is true, but that has to start in his own department. The question then will be what exactly should that risk appetite be for? If it is just back to promoting a fossil fuel-powered, roads-based and sprawled development model then it will do more harm than good.
More than anything else we need every department to have a greater risk appetite when it comes to tackling climate change. Unfortunately the Department of Public Expenditure has so far shown a distinct lack of willingness to take up their own responsibility in that regard. It has refused to take on the role of overseeing the reduction in emissions within the public service itself, which rightly belongs to it.
If all the proposals due to be announced to streamline regulatory processes, cut environmental legal bills and eliminate red tape only accelerate an unsustainable infrastructure model, they will fail us. I would like to hear Chambers and his colleagues acknowledge that the department responsible for public service reform is first and foremost willing to reform itself.
Eamon Ryan is a former minister for the environment and chairman of the European Commission’s housing advisory board
