What is most depressing about the Auditor and Comptroller General's Report is not the astounding revelations about the incompetence and maladministration in so much that this State does, but rather the astounding lack of public anger at the revelations made in it.
Here we have the servants of a State behaving as exactly as you might expect the civil servants of Mexico in 1959 to have behaved, the only difference being that one arm of that State - the office of Comptroller and Auditor - in its efficiency and vigilance more resembles something from Bismarck's Prussia; yet the only sound we can hear from the politicians put into Leinster House to supervise their activities is that of snoring from beneath sombreros.
And the politicians snore because the public snores; and the public snores in part because we are still beset with his idiot-heresy that a state's misappropriation and misuse of public moneys is not nearly as bad or wicked or dangerous as misappropriation by a private individual for personal gain. What is being judged - in good Catholic fashion - is motive, not effect. That is like saying Chernobyl was not so bad because it was accidental and nobody meant it.
Blundering around
"A bit of a joke, you've got to laugh," observed an interviewer on Radio 1 the other day, perfectly encapsulating the popular attitude to public moneys. You can be sure that if he had been talking about money being funnelled illegally into the privately owned beef industry for the purposes of profit, he would not have referred to it as a joke. But merely because it is the State, without any intention of making an illicit profit, blundering around like a drunk at a funfair pulling handles on the big dipper control and causing the carousel to propel infants into the next county, the matter seems beyond serious investigation or serious comment (other than in a commendable editorial in this newspaper).
Wasted money anywhere is inexcusable; but in this State, with our appalling infrastructure and our growing underclass of illiterate and ambitionless youngsters, and with our catastrophic drugs problems in housing estates which are barely better than third-world shanty towns, wasted money is a sin. But it does not belong to that robust class of sin called commission, but to the more elusive, hard-to-pin down peasant variety called omission. The path to hell is paved with deeds undone.
It is a year since the Comptroller reported that the Revenue Commissioners had acknowledged that they would not be able to collect £1.5 billion in unpaid taxes; that the refurbishment of Dublin Castle cost nearly £2.5 million more than promised; that £3 million had been spent on a prison kitchen which then lay unused for three years; that welfare fraud was costing millions; that 200 Department of Agriculture staff were paid in advance for overtime that they then never worked, even as the Department lost £9 miilion in Euroloot for failure to adhere to EU rules.
Did heads rolls for this? Were careers ruined? Were people shown that it is also possible to be unemployed actually outside the Civil Service, viz., on the dole? I somehow don't think so. Because this year's report is every bit as damning as the horror from 1996.
Welfare fraud
A swimming pool in Fermoy which was expected to cost £300,000 cost nearly £1.5 million more than that. The bright lads in the Department of Agriculture don't seem to have caught up on their overtime yet - several thousand cattle received both male and female animal subsidies. Welfare fraud is known to have cost £19 million in overpayment (actually an under-estimate, as the workforce survey has shown) involving 10,500 cases of fraud, yet only 56 cases led to prosecution.
Dole fraud provides an interesting insight into one reason why people are reluctant to speak out about it. When I wrote a column on it recently, Michael Allen of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed wrote to this newspaper, beginning his letter: "Kevin Myers's attack on unemployed people . . ."
Wha'?
Throw in another odd witless aside or two ("Has Mr Myers forgotten that during the 1980s, Ireland experienced the most severe and prolonged unemployment crisis of any country?") and you get a fair measure of the level of debate we enjoy about such matters. Unless you declare that the unemployed, to a man and a woman, are blameless victims of society (oh yes, and unemployment was high in the 1980s) you are attacking the poor, the homeless, the deprived. We all want to be on the side of the angels: who will dare open their mouths, and risk a belt from the latest crozier within Irish life?
(An interesting thing, by the way, this Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed: organisations for permanent conditions such as the blind and/or countrywomen and/or travellers I understand. They have a constituency which is real and tangible and which can vote and pay annual membership dues and so on. But the unemployed? "Dear INOU, I enclose my annual membership subscription to your august organisation . . ")
Cargo-cult economics
I do not blame the civil servants for the state of affairs, because they are doing what is expected of them; and I do not blame the politicians, because they are doing the same. There is snoring from beneath their sombreros because state squandering of national resources and public moneys arouses no ire in the electorate. We have a cargo-cult economic culture in our perception of the State. Though the refutation is before our eyes every time we open our pay-packets, we nonetheless behave as if the State's wealth is mysteriously washed ashore: and since we appear to believe that the wealth is not earned, then who is to complain if it is merely squandered, rather than consciously stolen by big business?
Who is to complain? To paraphrase Mary McAleese when asked what authorities she could cite for her preposterous notions about the constitutional role of the Presidency: "Me. That's who."