A whiff of arrogance rises from contact negotiation

SOMETIMES it is dangerous for people in power to be proved right. Dick Spring was certainly proved right in much of what he had to say about Fianna Fail and the beef industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The bitter proof will be evident in Brussels next month when the EU Commission announces whether it will follow through with its threat to make £100 million in penalties the wages of misgovernment at that time.

But vindication can lead to self righteousness, even to arrogance, and there is at the very least a whiff of arrogance about the way in which the contract for Government advertising in the divorce referendum campaign seems to have been handled.

On the face of it, last week's revelations in the High Court and the subsequent explanations by Dick Spring and Fergus Finlay suggest, at best, a degree of complacency about what transparent government really means; at worst, a careless disregard for fair and open procedures.

One of the problems with even trying to debate this issue is that the attack has been led by Fianna Fail, and that kettles tend to take on a dazzling sheen when pots are calling them black.

We know, and Michael Woods knew when he raised the allegations at the start of the week, that Fianna Fail in the recent past awarded much more substantial contracts for public business without even going through the motions of a tendering procedure.

In 1994 the Dail Committee of Public Accounts was told of the circumstances in which two firms, John Hogan and Associates and Carr Communications, were hired to provide services - economic analysis and PR work respectively - to the state legal team at the beef tribunal. Between them, these contracts were worth nearly 10 times the fee paid to the Quinn McDonnell Pattison (QMP) advertising agency.

IN THE case of John Hogan and Associates and of Carr Communications, there was no tendering procedure at all. One part of the government itself - the Progressive Democrats ministers - was not consulted about the appointments or offered the services of either company.

And in the case of John Hogan and Associates the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, which theoretically employed the company, was informed only on the day of the appointment and told that the then Taoiseach (Mr Albert Reynolds) had already agreed to it.

The expenditure on their services was sanctioned by the Department of Finance three weeks after they had begun work. In the case of Carr Communications, sanction from the Department of Finance issued all of seven months after the company was engaged and working.

So it is hardly surprising that Fianna Fail's attack on the Government over the QMP affair has been along the lines of "If it's OK for them, why wasn't it OK for us?" It is not an especially noble question, but it is a reasonable one. And the answer must be that it was not OK for Fianna Fail and it is not OK for Labour. Being slightly better than Fianna Fail is not good enough.

In a sense, the most obvious thing about the award of a Government contract to QMP is the least relevant. It does not greatly matter that one of the partners in the agency is a brother of the Minister for Finance. Ireland is a small place, and ministers come from big families. The Government did not "bury" the appointment of QMP, as the agency had advised it to do.

There is nothing to suggest that this advertising agency was in general unfairly favoured when Government business was being handed out. It seems, indeed, from the infamous letter itself, that QMP had tendered unsuccessfully for prestigious and lucrative Government contracts before the divorce campaign. And it would be patently unfair if a reputable company was to be denied government work simply on the basis of a family relationship.

But all of this depends on the existence and implementation of procedures which are demonstrably independent and coherent. You expect, people in power when faced with a potential conflict of interest to be very careful indeed.

But even accepting the version of events put forward by Fergus Finlay and Dick Spring, it is clear that the procedures were neither, as they claimed, stringent nor rigorous. In at least three; respects, the way things were done was flawed.

IT IS clear, for one thing, that after the initial tendering procedure in November 1993, QMP was given to understand on an informal basis that it had the job, even though no formal appointment had been made, no formal contract had been issued and presumably no sanction had been received from the Department of Finance for the expenditure that would be involved. No decision should have been communicated to the company before it was properly and formally made.

In the second place, it is clear that there was at best a degree of ambiguity about whether or not that informal appointment had been set at naught and a new process of appointment begun in 1995, after the change of government.

On the one hand, as Fergus Finlay told Sean O'Rourke on RTE radio, the tendering process "wasn't reopened". On the other, a Cabinet sub committee was reviewing "all the preparations that had been done, including the choice of an advertising agency," and was not, again according to Fergus Finlay, "bound by any previous decision that had been made." But how could that process of review be a genuinely open one if the tendering process had not been reopened?

And thirdly, for some unknown reason, the other agency involved in the "review" by the Cabinet sub committee, McConnell's, was not told that its bid for the contract had been unsuccessful.

This may well have been merely an administrative oversight. But it seems extraordinary, given the acknowledged sensitivity of a process that involved the awarding of a public contract to a company partly owned by the brother of the Minister for Finance, that such a simple and obvious procedure should have been neglected.

None of these flaws suggests any degree of corruption or shady dealing, and none of them is itself all that serious. But all of them taken together suggest an arrogant complacency about the use of power and of public money. And that impression has been enhanced by the handling of the issue this week.

Legitimate questions about these events arose from the High Court proceedings, yet they were treated with alarming high handedness.

To describe such questions as "grubby", to use such phrases as "absolute bilge" about them, is to treat with contempt concerns which, in almost the same breath, Fergus Finlay accepted as being proper and legitimate ones. And to rely at the same time on the old cry of sub judice is to compound the insult.

Having been proved right about the disastrous consequences of careless and opaque government in the past, Labour should know better how to avoid it in the present.