Last year, a man got annoyed when his county council made obvious mistakes in dealing with a planning application, writes Fintan O'Toole
Getting no satisfaction from the council officials, he complained to the office of Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly. The ombudsman looked into the complaint, found it to be justified and discussed it with council officials. The ombudsman asked them to rectify the errors and to apologise to the irate man. They agreed to do so. Nothing happened.
The officials took legal advice and then declared that it was "against council policy" to say sorry for mistakes. The legal advice was a smokescreen. After yet more meetings with the ombudsman's office, the officials accepted that they could, after all, apologise. Blood finally spurted from the turnip.
According to the ombudsman, this little case is "not an isolated incident". Time and again, therefore, official time and public money is wasted on the painful extraction of common sense from bureaucratic pettiness. By the time a result is achieved, the good has gone out of it.
Another citizen is left resentful and alienated. And another TD is rubbing his hands at another great result for the clientelist system.
Every petty screw-up in a Government or local authority office, every surly refusal to take responsibility and fix the problem, every time the word "sorry" is muttered only at the end of a Busby Berkeley musical, there's another sack of meaningless letters signed by a TD weighing down the back axle of a post office van.
The democratic system is yet again defined as one in which the rights of the citizen are delivered as a personal favour whose implied reward is a vote. Over the past few decades, there have been times when it seemed as if we were moving away from this system.
Public servants have been trained to call the rest of us "clients". Openness, transparency and accountability have been enshrined as the principles of public administration.
Organisations such as Comhairle and the ombudsman's office have been established to give impartial advice on the rights of citizens and to protect those rights when they are abused. The internet has enabled much easier and more direct access to public bodies. The obituaries of clientelism have all been written and set in type, ready for the day it dies. But, as we can see from Tony Killeen's revelation that his office sends out 22,000 representations a year, the system is alive and kicking.
One part of the answer is that the culture of bureaucratic arrogance ran very deep. A simple principle of democratic governance is that people are entitled to be given reasons for official decisions. Yet it was only in November 2003 that Michael McDowell formally accepted that his Department of Justice should "normally" give reasons for the refusal of an application for naturalisation. Before that, it was, as he admitted in a Dáil reply, positive departmental policy not to do so.
Another underlying problem is the way in which so many key public services - health and education among them - are delivered by charitable and voluntary organisations. However fine the work done by many of these organisations, their ethos was traditionally one of charity rather than of entitlement. Especially in the case of church bodies, the chain of responsibility can extend all the way up to God, whose mysterious ways are proverbial. In our church-owned health system, for example, the very concept of a statutory complaints procedure only emerged in 2004 and has yet to become a functioning reality.
The combination of a post-imperial civil service and the concept of public services as charity created a particularly deep culture of bureaucratic indifference. Transforming it demands sustained democratic energy.
But where is that energy to come from when the public representatives who should be generating it are instead wedded to a system in which they position themselves as the fixers who mediate between an inadequate system and an unhappy constituent?
The reality is that, in the last few years, the democratisation of public services has stalled and, in some significant respects, been reversed. The internet, for those who can't use it, has become just another barrier. The ombudsman noted last year that, "My experience is that an ordinary PAYE taxpayer who is not computer literate would find it almost impossible to speak by telephone to a relevant Revenue official."
The fine codes of conduct for public servants are, as the ombudsman also noted, "more concerned about appearances than reality". The Freedom of Information Act has been deliberately neutered by the Government. New non-departmental public bodies have mushroomed: the Democratic Audit project has estimated that we've gone from 130 in 1998 to 900 now. Few of them have any clear lines of accountability. Most spectacularly, the creation of the HSE has both removed the local accountability of the old health boards and excused the Minister for Health from answering questions about services in the Dáil. The black holes in which clientelism thrive have expanded and they are filled with the waste paper on which politicians bother bureaucrats.