There is a shocking omission from almost all the party manifestos produced for the forthcoming election, says Mary Raftery.
There is a shocking omission from almost all the party manifestos produced for the forthcoming election. They are silent on an issue which periodically attracts public opprobrium and which reached a crescendo of outrage late last year at the time of the first revelations of the now notorious whip-around among friends for Bertie Ahern.
When the names of those friends finally became known, it emerged that a significant number of them had been appointed by the Fianna Fáil/PD Government to positions on various public bodies.
Of the 12 apostles who gave so generously to the Taoiseach in 1993 and 1994, five had been appointed to such boards. They are Padraic O'Connor (ACC Bank), Des Richardson (Aer Lingus), Joe Burke (chair, Dublin Port), Jim Nugent (Cert and the Central Bank) and David McKenna (Enterprise Ireland).
Ahern explained helpfully at the time that they had been appointed precisely because they were his friends. (He had, of course, denied that their generosity to him had anything to do with the State favours conferred upon them.) Last February in the Dáil, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte asked was there "anybody in the Drumcondra retinue who has not been appointed to one agency or another?" The Taoiseach's oblique reply was that "a handful of poor people from Drumcondra are beleaguered because they have known me for 40 years but that is how it is".
In the context of the public controversy over how people are appointed to State boards, it is all the more surprising that so many party manifestos have ignored the issue. Only the Green Party mentions it at all, with its stated intention to "set up a joint Oireachtas Committee to oversee appointments to public bodies". Fine Gael and Labour have in the past been trenchant in their criticism of cronyism when it comes to "packing State boards", and have proposed reform in the area, generally along the lines specified by the Greens.
Which makes it all the more surprising that they make no mention of the issue in their manifestos. Even Fine Gael's fanfare launch yesterday of its plans to make government more accountable also ignored the matter of these public appointments.
Could it possibly be that as the prospect of a change of government becomes more real, Fine Gael and Labour realise that it might at last become their turn to pack the boards of public bodies with their very own choices? Would it be churlish to suggest that this lay behind the questioning of Bertie Ahern in the Dáil last February as to his Government's intentions on State appointments in the last moments before it left office? It might be remembered that in the final days of the last government in 2002, at least 60 such appointments were made, in one case by a minister who was no longer even an elected representative.
Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats do not have a monopoly on such activity. Neither Fine Gael nor Labour were perceived to be particularly shy during the mid-1990s rainbow coalition period when it came to the appointment of their party activists to public boards.
With the realisation that a government will during the course of its tenure fill upwards of 5,000 positions on 800 State bodies, this represents enormous opportunity for political patronage and reward.
There are no independent, monitored criteria or processes for the selection of those who serve the public in this way. Many of those appointed have no specific or relevant expertise. And while there are, of course, several highly skilled and suitably qualified people who are members of State boards, the ad-hoc and questionable nature of the appointments system cannot but undermine public confidence in the entire apparatus of government.
Most mature democracies have in place transparent systems for the appointment of those who sit on bodies which make and implement public policy. They have not found that the creation of open and accountable processes of application and interview for these positions makes finding people willing to serve more difficult.
Further, in the context of the growing hands-off nature of our current Government, and its delegation of substantial areas of responsibility to these public bodies, it is even more critical that the appointments process be entirely removed from all taint of patronage and cronyism. All of which makes it even more disappointing that the two major Opposition parties ignored the issue in their manifestos.
In a striking admission to the Dáil last February, Bertie Ahern said the following: "I do not agree with packing boards on the eve of a general election. The practice has been that after a general election people tend to pack boards. I do not agree with that practice."
He did not, however, commit his Government to any particular policy or course of action on the issue. It is a space we should watch carefully over the coming weeks, whatever the outcome of the election.