If you examine the budgets of many recent, major public projects, they tend to break down as follows: 10 per cent to contractors; 10 per cent kept aside in case the foreign workers turn out to have been underpaid; and 72 per cent towards paying the consultants employed on the project.
The remaining seven per cent, of course, is put towards the inevitable cost of an investigation into what it was the consultants were employed to do in the first place.
For an industry that is not traditionally unionised, consultants often seem to have extraordinary pay and working conditions. You wonder if negotiations over pay deals perhaps involve the consultants being given an offer, followed by a 10-minute break to allow the consultants to stop laughing hysterically.
Some €60 million of the cost of the PPARS (Personnel, Payroll And Related Systems) debacle went to consultants, which wouldn't seem so bad if it wasn't for the fact that the entire government allocation for outside consultancies in 2006 was €60 million.
When it was recently reported that Health Services Executive chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm had five advisers at his side, it was revealed that they were earning up to €202,000 for working only 135 days a year. Then they could earn up to €1,500 for each day of overtime. That would embarrass a Frenchman. Even the strongest union couldn't negotiate a deal that sweet. Unless they employed some consultants to look into for them.
We live in a consultancy-based economy. Behind every minister there is a good adviser. And behind her or him, another 20 advisers. Remove them, and the government would have a lot more money, but no idea of what to spend it on. The country would grind to a halt, paralysed by the sudden dearth of people to carry out public consultation documents and detailed feasibility studies.
Consultants are involved in the project-planning stage. Then there are consultants brought in for the project itself, sometimes paid lots of money before being given the mission to keep the costs down. Inevitably, things run horrendously over-budget. PR consultants are employed to keep the mess out of the papers - and when they fail, an independent consultant is drafted in to investigate where it all went wrong. Finally, some consultants are brought in to implement the recommendations made in that independent consultant's report.
So their extinction is an utterly unlikely event. They are so integral to every Irish project that even a primary school child wouldn't dare make a collage without first contracting Deloitte & Touche to produce a Study Into the Feasibility of Combining Feathers and Egg Boxes in Collage-Based Homework.