WE KNOW, we just know, what kind of attack in the Dail would have been launched by Democratic Left and the Labour Party if the Blood Transfusion Services Board had been a privately owned company.
Even now, as the sun sets on state owned enterprises, the last lingering remnants of that habitual "Let's be nice to the semi states" protects the BTSB in ways which would never apply to a privately owned company.
The BTSB is the beneficiary of double standards because it was immune to the profit motive which, until quite recently, was just about the worst quality one could attribute to a company.
Now, looking back on the blundering idiocies which litter the landscape of the past, we might well wonder not why the state is doing so well now but how it survived the gross interference done by busy body, muddle headed, politically motivated economic illiterates for so long.
Modern capitalism is like children in a school. It needs to have rules - over things like safety and children crawling up chimneys and so on and goals, which in school means academic or technical achievement, and in capitalism means profit.
The falsehood of the statist approach to the economy from the Lemass era onwards - in fact it goes back far longer, to the Congested Districts Boards and before - was the that the state knew best, its employees were disinterested and honourable people and that, most of all, profit was a dirty word.
Honourable and Decent
So the Sugar Company's Mickie Joe Costello was seen as a great man, because he was honourable and decent and didn't give a fig for profits, and someone like Tony O'Reilly, who effectively inherited MJ's mantle, is a scoundrel because he is, most emphatically, interested in profits (as a consequence of which MJC's enterprise employs nobody in Ireland, AJFOR's employs about 10,000).
A society which doesn't place a priority on profits is one which will soon go the way of Nineveh and Tyre.
Existing capital must be added to. It is a moral imperative which has driven society since the invention of agriculture and the discovery of that phenomenon, the future.
No, those who are profit driven are not driven by morality; but they merely have a fuel in quantities which the rest of us do not possess.
Wise societies should recognise that fuel and use it, just as wise societies will see sea and wind and coal and oil and the nuclear secrets of uranium as sources of energy.
But because Catholic Ireland made the association between sin and profit, and because of the cultural aversion towards the gombeenman after the informer the most loathed figure in Irish myth - the preferred form of economic activity up until recently involved the state in worthy, loss making enterprises.
Grinning Boobies
Year after year these grinning boobies, Aer Lingus, Bord na Mona, CIE, recorded losses or indifferent returns, merely because they were seen as serving a useful function within Irish life.
Not merely were billions squandered in money raised from real incomes and a real economy, but real economic potential - finally being realised, for example, by such as Ryanair - was squandered, and a ruinous culture was spread through out the land: the state was there to help.
It was. Only in emergency. It might help put out the fire, but it would not build your house in the first place; yet the expectation was that the state (whatever that is) should give you a job, should build your house, should subsidise your bus and train, should provide your television and radio service, and should run things like blood transfusion banks.
I used to be a blood donor. My blood is quite rare - B Positive. We BPs are reasonably cherished individuals and, though I hated the needle going in, I always thought this was worth doing; for like so many people in Irish life, I believed in the virtue of unprofit.
The BTSB was classically unprofitable, and was fragrant with virtue.
Or so I thought until the year 1981, when the Blood Transfusion Service (as it was called) moved offices a few hundred yards across the Grand Canal. The public service unions negotiated for the workforce £250 "displacement money" for each of the BTS's 198 staff members - which comes to a total of £49,500.
To put it in perspective, The Irish Times at that time cost 20p. Our price has risen less than inflation (and we most definitely are driven by profit, thank God: no profit, no pension for yaws trooly) but conservatively, we can say the BTS gave away getting on for a quarter of a million pounds in today's money to its staff for the inconvenience of walking to a workplace 200 yards away from their former workplace.
Try that one on in a company which is driven by the absolute moral and economic requirement to return a profit on capital invested. We know that the false world of zero gravity unprofit was being invoked by that scandalous disbursement of public money. For unprofit is the great lie of public service.
Unprofit is made possible only by the seizure of other people's profits and their redeployment as goodies to the state sector.
Fiscal Fecklessness
Because what happened with the BTS was that it was run for the convenience and salaries of its employees; and when I realised this central truth - and maybe I was being stupid and emotional - I stopped giving blood, and I have never given it since.
But disregard for public monies is not merely an obvious symptom of fiscal fecklessness. Fecklessness in institutions is not monodimensional.
It expresses itself through the entire company culture, not merely in the way it regards money, but also in the way its named priorities - such as the provision of blood - are superseded by unnamed priorities - such as the convenience and ease of a subsidised workforce.
Seldom are the results of such fecklessness so catastrophic as in the BTSB; but from the day when the BTS squandered a fortune on its staff, was such a result so surprising?