If there was a Lotto-size prize for the nomination of the most incompetent public official in Ireland at present, nobody would make much money because there would be so many winners, writes Vincent Browne.
The most incompetent public official in Ireland, by a long distance, surely, without doubt and without challenge: Martin E. Cullen. Martin E. Cullen, Farmleigh-man. The Minister of State for Public Works, who bought Farmleigh House for £23 million (yes, punts), after it had gone on sale for £13 million. No, not the other way around. It went for sale at £13 mil- lion and he bought it on behalf of the nation for £23 million. Then he spent £20 million of our money to do it up - imagine buying a house for £23 million and having to pay almost the same again to put it in habitable order! And for what? As The Irish Times revealed on Monday, it was used by just a single foreign visitor so far this year, Kofi Annan, and I bet he wished he was in Wynn's or Buswells.
It would be unfair to suggest Farmleigh is used only for the entertainment of foreign visitors (or rather one foreign visitor). There are a few concerts there during the summer and Celia Larkin (remember her?) had a reception there to promote her beauty treatments. But that's it, as far as I know. I made an application myself to do a radio programme from there. I didn't want to stay the night, I didn't need a beauty treatment (let me rephrase that: I did not request or want a beauty treatment), just a room from which to broadcast a radio programme with a few homeless people. They would not have it; not the homeless people, the Office of Public Works.
The purchase of Farmleigh House is not just a laughing matter. It indicates casualness on the part of this Government on the expenditure of public funds, suggesting an absence of priorities or coherence. What conceivable justification could there have been, for instance, to spend £43 million on Farmleigh House rather than spend that money on the refurbishment of mental hospitals? Yes, I know many of them have been refurbished but not all of them.
The admission wing of the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum has not been refurbished and conditions there are simply appalling - patients accommodated in conditions worse than even the worst of prison conditions.
Martin E. Cullen and his likes would probably retort: it is not an either-or issue. It is an either- or issue. Instead of spending that €43 million in giving dignity to some of the most vulnerable in our society, it was considered better to spend the money on the Farmleigh House gaff.
There is then the e-voting machines on which Martin E. Cullen squandered €50 million, a piece of incompetence born of arrogance and ignorance.
The relevance of this is that this same man, who has such a proven record of spectacular incompetence, is now the Minister with responsibility for decisions on the future of the national airline, the major air traffic port in the country, Dublin Airport, the future of the rail network, the metro and public transport generally.
Decisions to be taken in this realm will have consequences for decades to come, maybe centuries.
Indeed decisions on transport already have had the most profound impact on our civilisation - for instance the decision, taken initially by default, to permit the unbridled development of private motorised transport has changed communities (destroyed communities?), even changed the nature of human personality, devastated the environment and sucked massive resources from real needs to the temporary satisfaction of private preferences - temporary because the initial attraction of private transport was its capacity to transport people swiftly to their intended destination, a capacity now disabled because of the profusion of cars.
Incidentally, what has happened in the realm of private transport is an illustration of the chaos unleashed by the unregulated operation of "free choice".
Air travel is now an important dimension to our lives. The emergence of competition in this sector has had hugely beneficial consequences, but do we want the market to be the sole determinant of policy in this area for ever more, with all its fickleness, unpredictability and avarice? Should the community, through the agency of the State, not have some determining influence, not just through their individuated choices but through public policy and if we sacrifice Aer Lingus to private control, is that capacity not lost or at least radically diminished? Generally, on transport, is there not now a case for confining the monster of private transport by the development of diverse forms of public transport at the expense of private transport by giving over a much larger part of road space exclusively to public transport?
By public transport I do not mean necessarily just publicly owned transport but any transport that is available for public use, such as taxis and privately operated bus companies.
These are questions that have ramifications into the long term and it is not at all reassuring that the person with primary responsibility in this area is Martin E. Cullen, Farmleigh-man.