IF YOU were looking for something that epitomises what went wrong in Ireland over the last decade, the Dublin Docklands Development Authority fits the bill. The story told by the three confidential reports into its activities released yesterday is a vignette highlighting the ethical failings in the business and political spheres which wreaked such havoc in the wider economy.
It is not strictly correct to say that there was nothing wrong with the concept of the DDDA. We now know that one of its fundamental powers – the granting of planning permission – was flawed in law. But, while this legislative error on behalf of the Government may have made the disaster possible, it did not cause it. The responsibility for that lies with the individuals who in time came to dominate the DDDA and wielded its considerable powers, with the worst of the damage done between 2005 and 2007 when Seán FitzPatrick and Lar Bradshaw were firmly in the driving seat.
The number of controversial planning approvals granted by the authority accelerated from this point, according to the reports, culminating in the extraordinary decision to participate in the redevelopment of the Glass Bottle site in late 2006.
Put simply the DDDA lost the plot, overreached itself and has now come a cropper. It happened, not because it was fundamentally flawed, but because the individuals charged with policing the organisation not only failed to rein it in, they actively encouraged it to take risks and on occasion facilitated it.
It is no coincidence that Seán FitzPatrick, one of the main cheerleaders for the laissez-faire approach to regulation and economic policy that has proved so disastrous, was a dominant influence on the board. The approach adopted by the DDDA was the perfect foil for the “divil-take-the-hindmost” lending practices of his bank, Anglo Irish.
It is arguably unfair to single out Seán FitzPatrick and Lar Bradshw as the DDDA’s combined nemesis. There was the rest of the board, drawn from the great and the good of Irish business, plus a small army of bankers, planning consultants, lawyers and other executives involved. FitzPatrick however is the totemic figure of the culture of corporate myopia and greed that engulfed Ireland and the DDDA.
The initial outcome of the conflagration of low standards, cheap money and reckless greed in the Dublin docks delighted the political sponsors of the project in the same way the economic activity linked to the wider property bubble was unambiguously seen as evidence of good government.
And in the same way the current Government still has to be held properly to account for its mismanagement of the economy, it must also be held to account for allowing the DDDA to go off the rails so spectacularly.
Fine Gael are making as much political capital out of the DDDA as they possibly can. But they are right on the fundamental point that without some investigation of what transpired at the nexus between Government and the DDDA we will never have accountability.