A long history of political appointments has left a disastrous legacy in many State enterprises
WE HAVE recently seen glaring examples of gross failures by boards of State bodies to exercise their functions of protecting the public interest against abuses of power for personal advantage by senior executives.
How did these failures of supervision occur? Basically they occurred because of a gradual erosion of public standards, by successive governments. At the outset high standards were set. After the establishment of the State in December 1922, almost all government appointments were made by an independent Civil Service Commission – despite huge pressure for political appointments from Cumann na nGaedheal formed in April 1923. The bitter rows on this issue between the new party and the already established cabinet, in which my father was a minister, are vividly recorded in the party’s minute book.
Then, in 1926, widespread corruption and bribery in local appointments, going back to the period when councils had been dominated by the Irish Parliamentary Party, was brought to an end when the Local Appointments Commission was established. As far as I know, the only appointments not thereafter safeguarded from such political action were those of the judiciary, rate collectors, county registrars, government messengers and manual employees of local councils – and, after the later establishment of vocational education, vocational teachers.
A complication was the fact that after the Civil War hundreds of leading republicans who continued to reject the new State had been blacklisted for public appointments. Understandably, when Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932, this provision was modified, and a certain number of political appointments were made by the new government outside the framework of the two appointments commissions. However, the new government subsequently also made ruthless use of the exceptions listed above.
The first new State boards had been established in 1927, and, as such bodies proliferated in the 1930s and 1940s their boards were rapidly politicised. Unhappily, by 1948 when Fianna Fáil lost power, this practice was maintained by the incoming coalition government, who justified this departure from the standards of the 1920s by what they saw as a need to balance Fianna Fáil appointments during the preceding 16 years. And so it has continued since then.
I wrote about such political appointments almost 50 year ago* before I had any political involvement. I wrote: “Few, even among politicians, would deny that appointments have in the past been made that would be hard to justify on grounds of personal qualifications or ability, and in a country where the available talent is . . . limited because of the small size of the population, anything which lowers the quality of board membership must be a matter of regret.”
There have been some disastrous examples of the effects of political appointments on State boards. One extreme case was that of Irish Shipping whose board in the 1970s included political appointments by both sides. That board permitted one man to hold simultaneously the posts of chairman, chief executive and chief accountant. And at the height of a shipping boom shortly before the first oil crisis he was allowed to enter into a contract with a Hong Kong company to charter vessels for a sum of £200 million (€2.3 billion in today’s money – but equivalent to almost €10 billion as a share of GNP).
In the aftermath of the oil crisis, we in government did not feel that the State could accept liability for such a huge sum, so we had to allow Irish Shipping to be wound up.
Most tragically for its employees, we found ourselves legally precluded from ever offering these unfortunate people any compensation without opening the State to a legal claim for that massive sum. This was an injustice for which the political appointments system to its board carried ultimate responsibility.
In a particularly flagrant case of abuse of power, during the interim period after the defeat of Charles Haughey-led governments in June 1981 and November 1982, An Bord Pleanála’s board was sinisterly filled with two sets of friends of Ray Burke. As a result, in early 1983 Dick Spring as minister for local government had to abolish that board and reconstitute it with directors chosen from lists drawn up by different outside groups, so as to protect this hugely sensitive body from any further political manipulation.
As taoiseach I set about controlling the abuse of political appointments by requiring all ministers to submit to Dick and myself all proposals for State board membership – before these were brought to government. We used this mechanism to limit politically influenced appointments to not more than one to any board, confined to persons with relevant competence. My recollection is that we lost only two of these cases at cabinet, which made two such appointments rather than one to the board of Aer Lingus, and three to that of Bord na gCon.
We should, of course, have initiated legislation to control these abuses, but regrettably economic/financial pressures during the life of that government plus our involvement with Northern Ireland distracted us from thus institutionalising reform of appointments to State boards – a reform that would of course have involved a huge battle with Fianna Fáil under its then leader.
I hope that the two opposition parties may before the next general election commit themselves firmly to such a reform, which, together with banning business funding of parties, would demonstrate beyond doubt their commitment to honest government.
A possible approach would be to require the appointment of State board chairs to be made by agreement with the opposition, together with a procedure whereby the chairs would then be consulted on other appointments to their board, with a possible veto on appointments they saw as inappropriate. And appointments, at least to the boards of the more important State bodies, might also be subject to vetting and/or approval by an Oireachtas committee.
Moreover, a ban should be imposed on the disgraceful practice under which defeated governments have used the weeks between an election and their replacement in office to fill with their supporters any board vacancies left while they were busy preparing for or fighting the election. After both my defeats, in January 1982 and March 1987, I absolutely refused to allow any such appointments.
* State-Sponsored Bodies. Institute of Public Administration, 2nd Edition 1963, p.71