Government departments and State agencies too often avoid responsibility and leave the public facing bureaucracy that is designed “around everybody and everything but the citizen”, Taoiseach Simon Harris has said.
“That’s not intentional. It’s not on purpose. And I don’t say this to be disparaging, but if passing the parcel was an Olympic sport, we would be in with a chance of a medal,” he told the Kennedy Summer School in New Ross, Co Wexford, on Friday.
Too often, he said, he finds that, in Government Buildings meetings with “fine people, excellent people”, someone will say that the issue under consideration is “a matter for this department or a matter for this agency”, but not themselves.
“I have a very low tolerance threshold for somebody telling me that, you know, that there’s some bureaucratic reason why we can’t come together and fix this. You can’t boil the ocean, I get that,” he declared.
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“There are many parts of our system that work very well. But more and more, I think, when it comes to public policy and to delivery of issues, [issues] cut across narrow, neatly designed departments, agencies and structures.
“The one thing that I’ve learned late, since becoming taoiseach in April, is that the job of a taoiseach in many ways is to try and overcome that. So you’re actually the only person in the Government who can pull all of the various strands together,” he said.
Emphasising, if jokingly, that the next general election would take place “in March”, Harris said he has told every one of his Ministers that they are “the representatives of the public in their department, not the spokesperson for their departments”.
“When I was in the Department of Health, I wasn’t there as a doctor. When I was in the Department of Justice, I wasn’t a guard,” he said, “You are there in a representative democracy to be the voice of your people. It’s my job to be a disrupter.”
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Meanwhile, speaking about the immigration debate, the minority of people who have sought to weaponise concerns about the issue do not represent the vast majority of the “decent” people in the State, he told the summer school.
The amplification of angry voices on social media in Ireland and elsewhere is seen as evidence that “all of a sudden, we’ve lost that sense of meitheal, that we have lost that sense of community, or lost that sense of decency and respect”.
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Disagreeing sharply with that analysis, Harris, who was invited to be the subject for this year’s Noel Whelan lecture in honour of the late barrister and political commentator, said: “I don’t think that that is actually reflective of the overwhelming majority.”
Following numerous trips around the State over the summer months, Harris told former senior X executive Sinead McSweeney, “my fundamental takeaway from this has been decency, that people are decent”.
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