True-life Irish jokes stretch credulity more than the old Paddy-goes-to-London gags. They’re not half as funny either, despite the awfully low bar. The latest one about the Leinster House bike shelter that cost as much to build as an entire house, but still leaves the bicycles exposed to rain, comes with the familiar punch line – “and the people paid the bill!” Some genius somewhere, it seems, decided the bike-to-work scheme for the masses needed upgrading for the political class and approved €336,000 for a glorified parking rack. The result is a Selling Sunset-worthy bike shelter that fails to quite do what the descriptor says as rain pours down past the cantilevered canopy. If you needed a story that encapsulated this country’s barmy public infrastructure planning, you couldn’t make up a better one.
Ireland has amassed an embarrassment of true-life jokes. Their common theme is that the more money the Civil Service finds sloshing around the system, the bigger the joke. Who can forget the Oireachtas printer that, literally, raised the roof? The monster machine required so much head space the ceiling had to be elevated in its designated room in Kildare House to accommodate it, pushing the total cost of the acquisition to nearly €2 million.
In the Celtic Tiger heyday, the then minister for arts, sports and tourism, John O’Donoghue, and his wife had a chauffeured limousine take them from terminal three to terminal one at Heathrow airport at a cost to the public of €472. When challenged that the couple could have made the trip in three minutes on the airport’s free-of-charge shuttle bus, the government responded that it was State officials who had made the arrangement.
One of the non-funniest jokes of all was the Master of the Loo Rolls. When an additional junior ministry was created in the Department of Enterprise in 2007, a suitably fitted-out office was deemed requisite for the incoming appointee, John McGuinness. Having lavished €250,000 on the refurbishment, civil servants were warned that only superior quality toilet paper could be used in the ministerial en suite. Kittensoft, Inversoft and Andrex products were cited as acceptable in correspondence from an architects’ firm. The standard-issue “Oifig an t Soláthair” (Stationery Office) variety was to be avoided at all costs. McGuinness said he had played no role in the decision to, literally, flush the people’s money down the toilet.
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[ Leinster House bike shed twice as expensive as a five-star hotel per square metreOpens in new window ]
As every comedian knows, timing is everything. Details about O’Donoghue’s rock star mode of conveyance emerged just as the Irish economy was heading for the cliff edge in the 2008 crash. It provided a microcosm of the spend-spend-spend madness stoked by bankers, developers and certain politicians, such as Ivor Callely, who charged the people for car mileage to Leinster House from his holiday home in west Cork when he was actually living Dublin 3. Ditto RTÉ’s flip-flops last year. Had the State-owned broadcaster not been embroiled in a financial crisis, the rest of us may never have discovered that it splurged €5,000 on the most basic form of footwear as freebies for its corporate clients. The story of the flip-flops became a parable for all that was wrong in RTÉ’s executive culture.
While the Government may credibly deny any involvement in the Leinster House bike shed fiasco, the timing is woeful for the Coalition parties. In a week when some children could not get to school because there were no buses available and the number of homeless people living in emergency accommodation grew to a record 14,429, the arrant wastefulness at the house of parliament ignited public fury. Taoiseach Simon Harris has said the expenditure was “inexcusable” and Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan said the Office of Public Works (OPW) had “questions to answer”. But when the Irish Examiner requested a copy of the scoping documents for the bike shelter, the OPW refused to release them. Just as the Government thought it was cruising to a successful general election, up pops this iceberg to remind voters about the country’s batty infrastructure. You know the sort of thing – Luas stops with no car-parking facilities, bus stops with digital time displays for buses that never show up, disused railway tracks running parallel to roads clogged with pollution-belching vehicles.
As Albert Reynolds wisely observed: “It’s the little things that trip you up.” Governments have come and gone virtually unscathed by the rocketing price of the €2 billion-plus national children’s hospital, but a bike shed with bells on at Leinster House can prove to be voters’ breaking point. It certainly provides something to contemplate while waiting in the rain for a bus without the benefit of any shelter at all. Sometimes, when a problem is complex and protracted, a simple example of hubristic extravagance can become the emblem of all that is wrong. In this case, it begs the question: if the State cannot build an adequate bike shelter at a reasonable cost, how can it build a children’s hospital?
The bike shed is a double whammy. Not only is the cost of it infuriating but it exemplifies Ireland’s singular talent for daft planning decisions. It is located on the Merrion Square side of Leinster House – officially, the front of the building – whereas most people who cycle to work there enter from the Kildare Street side and park there. More bewildering is that, as the Government is telling us to ditch our cars to save the planet and the number of TDs will rise to 175 in the next Dáil, the new shelter can only accommodate 18 bicycles. Add the 60 senators, all the political parties’ staff with their own offices in the building, the administrators, catering staff, ushers, clerical staff, journalists and IT workers and the ratio of bike spaces to people in the building is roughly the same as the ratio of water to sand in the Sahara.
It is easy to spend money when it isn’t your own. It is twice as easy to spend it under the cloak of anonymity. That is why this latest true-life Irish joke cannot be allowed to slip gently into the annals of hilarity. Whoever thought €336,000 was money well spent on a bike shed must be held accountable. Otherwise, the joke is on us, again.