OPINION:Politicians must not be allowed to skew funding in favour of their constituencies
TODAY WE will be treated to yet more wall-to-wall coverage on the damning findings of the Moriarty tribunal in relation to Michael Lowry and Denis O’Brien. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth with many upset about what they see as the potential abuse of public office for private gain.
However, much of the commentary, while correct, may have lost sight of the woods for the trees. The findings of this tribunal and of many other instances of problems in Irish public office have a myriad of individual solutions, but they all boil down to one overarching problem – which is how decisions are made in Ireland.
The essential problem is the amount of leeway in our decision-making processes throughout the public service and Civil Service which allows for ad hoc, populist decisions, often based on little more than a whim. These loose processes allow decision-makers to divert funds to vested interests whether constituencies, businesses or trade unions.
The reason is that we do not focus enough on what it is we want our decisions to achieve. We do not have either oversight or transparency in the decision-making of ministries and we often lack the evidence needed to make the decisions.
Pundits put the blame on the people, condemning the inhabitants of Tipperary North for continuing to re-elect politicians like Lowry who deliver projects to their constituencies.
A politician who can deliver the bacon or the goodies to his constituency is often a powerful vote-getter and there are real cultural problems here arguably dating back to our post-colonial status.
But the real focus of our attention should be on how our system allows Lowry to deliver a large number of projects for his area, and indeed on why powerful ministers can do likewise for their own areas or indeed to the benefit of potent vested interests.
We also need to think about why the cabinet does not act to oversee the policies of all ministers allowing many to act like individual chieftains not only in terms of skewing money and decisions but also in driving through projects without sufficient scrutiny. This may sound trivial, but arguably the biggest financial decision in the history of our State, the bank guarantee scheme, was driven through by a cabinet minority with neither sufficient transparency nor scrutiny.
Ministers can and do, skew money to their own constituencies regardless of whether this is where the money is best spent. We know for example that disadvantaged areas receive less funding for both schools and sports capital programmes, and that areas with large numbers of children often receive less funding than those with far fewer children.
Pork-barrel politics are common the world over: what is different about Ireland is the extent to which we allow powerful individuals to dominate the outcome. The motive for the politician is re-election; we need only to think of John O’Donoghue, when he lost his seat, standing in that sports hall in Kerry making a plaintive speech bemoaning the fact that he helped to build it as a minister.
Powerful Independents, whom the government relied on to maintain a majority, can also ensure their constituents are recipients of such largesse.
This leeway to make decisions that are not in the general interest is not just about new schools, roads or sports projects, but also large-scale national projects such as benchmarking and decentralisation which delivered benefits to specific sectors of the population such as public servants or specific communities at the expense of the taxpayer.
All these problems, not just the delivering of funds to local areas, should be tackled by a change in culture, rules and practice in the Civil Service, where we should make decisions based on evidence and on predetermined policy where we decide in advance what outcomes any funding should achieve.
The deficiency in evidence-based or indeed even evidence-informed decision-making is endemic across our policymaking.
If we think about the debate on compulsory Irish for example, it would seem clear that the outcome of educational funding should be the best educated children possible. Yet the debate about compulsory Irish did not ask what the possibility of spending more time on subjects other than Irish for some children would imply for outcomes in OECD surveys but rather on the outcomes for bean an tí, who arguably, should not be the priority focus of our education funds.
The same is true of the argument about smaller schools, the outcome which should receive a considerable weighting in the debate is the educational outcomes for the children involved. In other words, as part of our decision-making process we should know whether small schools work, or do not work, in terms of broadly defined educational outcomes.
At the moment we rely on the Comptroller and Auditor General to examine spending. The office does a very good job, but the focus is one-sided. The CAG is accountancy based and its spotlight is on whether the allocated money has been wasted. This is extremely valuable, but the other side of the equation that we should examine is whether the money should have been allocated or if it has achieved its desired objectives. This is absent in many areas.
Tackling this is fairly straightforward. We need to decide what policy goals we want to achieve in every area of expenditure and then design some simple econometric models and impact assessments to measure outputs and outcomes and deploy these in every government department, even using some of the techniques already honed in environmental and health policy. If evidence is missing such as a database of schools accommodation, we should put this right.
We can start at the top with the large-ticket areas demanding to see specific outcomes and the extent to which they have been met by the spending. The civil servants in charge should have to report annually to the relevant Oireachtas committee and cross-departmental obstacles removed.
Such a system would also allow both civil servants and ministers to argue that any particular request to skew funding in any direction would simply not be allowed within the system. If we were to tackle this not only would we get much more efficient spending and save money, we would also ensure money is spent where it is needed, a side benefit would be that the delivery power of people like Lowry would be much reduced.
Jane Suiter is a lecturer in government at University College Cork