The State has taken far too long to divest itself of public sector activities, including running airlines and generating electricity, that could be delivered more effectively by the private sector, a business conference heard yesterday.
According to Professor Ed Walsh, president emeritus of the University of Limerick, the public sector should gradually withdraw from providing such services and from operating enterprises, except where State security or well-being is at stake or where there is a failure in the market.
Prof Walsh was addressing the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises annual conference in Enfield, Co Meath yesterday.
"In continuing to run such business, and lingering long after it should, State monopolies inhibit Irish private enterprise," Prof Walsh said.
"The distraction of running State enterprises and delivering public services has diverted the energies of public leadership...[ T]he public sector must now be re-oriented and streamlined so that it can withdraw and address the tasks required of it in the more mature, sophisticated, entrepreneurial Ireland that has emerged in the past decade."
"It must focus not on delivering services but on providing frameworks, legislation, regulations and infrastructure designed to make Ireland an unbeatable place in which to live and work."
Speaking to The Irish Times yesterday, Prof Walsh said the health service, electricity, universities and the provision of bus services were other examples of sectors which offered scope for private industry.
And he said Sweden provided a good indication of how reform of the health service through the use of private operators could be achieved successfully.
In a wide-ranging speech, Prof Walsh also called for public resources to be re-oriented towards what should be a core mission: building consensus around long-term "visionary" projects that catch the public imagination.
Malaysia's multimedia super corridor and the North Carolina triangle park in the US provided good examples of this. And improving the quality of the boards of those bodies which remained in public ownership was also essential, he added.
"The process is still quite arbitrary and there is often reason to doubt that the best minds available are invited to sit around the boardroom tables of public bodies," he said.
Prof Walsh also said the electoral system should be reformed through the introduction of the proportional representation list system.
Furthermore, he called for the local tax base of local government to be restored, and for the amalgamation of clusters of local authorities to provide more effective forms of local government units.
