Ministers should be held to account but so should senior civil servants, writes Marc Coleman, Economics Editor
At a Fine Gael briefing last Tuesday Richard Bruton stood beside two "surprise guests". The guests - cardboard cut-outs of Dick Roche and Martin Cullen - were presented as the two Cabinet Ministers whom the public would most like sacked.
The following day Pat Rabbitte and Liz McManus held a press conference on the subject of securing value for taxpayers' money.
Listing a litany of cost overruns on specific Government projects, such as the purchase of e-voting machines, Rabbitte echoed the view of Fine Gael the day before: taxpayers' money has been wasted by incompetent Ministers. Simply sack the Ministers, so the argument goes, and public-service waste will disappear.
It was put to the Labour leader on Wednesday that perhaps the waste of public money was not just a matter of ministerial responsibility. In particular it was suggested that for ministers to be held accountable they needed the power to hold others to account, namely the power to sack high-ranking public servants.
How else, after all, can a government minister ensure performance among the thousands - sometimes tens of thousands - of public servants executing the policies of government?
Should accountability for the performance of more than one-third of a million people employed in the public service boil down to the sacking of government ministers alone? The question has an important backdrop, that of benchmarking public-sector pay.
Already in 2002 the average public servant was paid 40 per cent more than the average private-sector worker. Public-sector pensions are widely regarded as "to die for", while the nurses' request for a 35-hour week illustrates just how different reality is for public-sector workers. Given such conditions - and given that private-sector workers pay for them - Pat Rabbitte was asked whether public servants found guilty of incompetence should be sacked.
His answer was honest and unequivocal: "I do not agree with the proposition that what is required is the sacking of incompetent public servants".
Justifying the answer, Rabbitte spoke of the "long traditions" of the public service. Traditions whereby ministers took ultimate responsibility for the mistakes of public servants.
It was precisely those traditions that were called on last week by both Labour and Fine Gael. Dick Roche, they argued, should be sacked for the debacle over the contamination of water supplies in Galway and Martin Cullen over the state of the transport system.
In a general election campaign an opposition politician is, of course, entitled to make such an argument. But what does making this argument reflect about the understanding of government, and the complexities of government, on the part of the person making it?
The context of Pat Rabbitte's response to the question put to him was a question posed by another newspaper over the Travers report into the scandal of nursing-home charges.
That report, although not blaming the former secretary of the department of health Michael Kelly, stated that an insufficiently detailed report given by him to Cabinet had contributed to the situation which arose. According to the Labour leader, Kelly had been scapegoated.
Without entering into that sensitive issue, the question needs to be asked: are there any circumstances under which public servants can be sacked?
Despite repeated questioning, Rabbitte felt this was not the answer to the problem of waste in the public sector. When the question was put to Fine Gael, a spokesperson for the party said that while of course existing disciplinary machinery within the public service could be used to do so, Fine Gael had no agenda to pursue such a course of action.
But the reality is that Dick Roche did not poison Galway's water supply. Nor did Martin Cullen call into being the complex array of stakeholders who for decades have defeated all attempts to make Ireland's public transport system efficient. Both men are temporary holders of office which afford even the longest-serving of their occupants barely enough time to grasp their brief, never mind envisage or implement change.
In their efforts to personalise issues of ministerial accountability, Fine Gael and Labour failed to grasp this point last week.
Of course, ministers must be held to account. Of course the cost overruns cited by the Labour Party last week are, mostly, real. However, a system of policy decision-making that reduces the question of government efficiency to the sacking of one minister has had its day.
As Pat Rabbitte said last week in relation to the Estimates procedure - by which government spending is allocated on an annual basis - it stems from the 19th century and is long overdue for reform.
So is the view that highly-paid public servants can any longer remain immune from accountability, no matter how incompetent they are or how irresponsible their actions.