There is a crisis of accountability at the top of the Irish public service. It resembles a Kafka-esque nightmare of rules, processes and committees, where the focus is on ensuring “strategies” are in place and all the boxes are ticked, rather than actually getting things done.
Politicians try to fix things, not by ensuring people do their jobs, but by putting in place workarounds – new bodies, committees and agencies to try to make progress. Housing is the ultimate example. Not only do we have a Minister and a Department of Housing, we will now how a Housing Activation Office which is meant to “get things done”. Of course, we don’t have anyone to take charge of it yet after this week’s fiasco, which culminated in Brendan McDonagh withdrawing from consideration for the position of the Government‘s new housing “tsar” after Fine Gael blocked his appointment.
But wait. There’s more. A new unit at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is also being filled with experts from state agencies to ensure proper co-ordination in delivering major projects, including key areas such as water and power. Isn’t this one of the things that the activation office is meant to be doing?
Then there is the Land Development Agency (LDA), which, according to its chairman, is “building on state and private lands in the near-term where possible and making sure the State has enough readily available land to be developed in the longer-term”.
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There are going to be a lot of people falling over each other here. And plenty of scope to spread the blame to the other lot when things go wrong.
It all comes back to the same simple question of accountability. Who is held responsible for housing delivery – and who has the power to get things done? Ultimately it is the Minister, of course – in this case James Browne. But we have seen under a variety of Ministers how difficult it is to actually get things done.
Part of this is because while we call the housing predicament a “crisis”, we don’t deal with it that way. In protecting the rights of the individual, those of society – and particularly its younger members – get pushed into second place. Planning is still being turned down because new apartments might “overlook” a local resident, for example. Massive projects vital for the future face the lottery of going through the planning and courts system, where decisions are made on points of law and not on the basis of the wider national interest.
If the tsar is not to face the same fate as his or her last Russian namesake, it would be essential to have the power to actually get things done – acting with the clear mandate of the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister for Housing
Delays are endless – and carry a huge economic and social cost. Metrolink may never happen. The holdups in major new water and wastewater projects for Dublin threaten the ability to build houses in the years to come, particularly in much of North Dublin. There will simply be no connections.
You can see the case for a tsar, but also why, as the Commission on Housing pointed out, he or she needs to be an all-powerful institution, and not just be another part of the bureaucracy.
The Government now has a choice. It can downgrade the activation office into a unit within the Department of Housing. It can come up with yet another housing plan with pages of recycled spoof. And hope that the numbers start to go in the right direction.
Or it can appoint a tsar and a small team with a real mandate to shake things up. If the Coalition wants to rescue something from the mess of this week, its only option is to go for it.
If the tsar is not to face the same fate as his or her last Russian namesake, it would be essential to have the power to actually get things done – acting with the clear mandate of the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister for Housing. Lines of responsibility need to be carefully drawn up – the office is about activation, as the name suggests, even though it would have a policy input in areas such as implementation of the new planning Bill. There will be crossover with other parts of the public service, along with noses out of joint. But it must be clear that when the tsar rings, the person taking the call listens.
Consider what this might look like and the message it could send. A housing tsar with a clear short-term action plan. Urgent meetings with those in charge of planning agencies, the courts and key bodies – all focused on speeding things up and identifying blockages. Calling in the boards of all the State agencies which have been slow to hand over land for development to the LDA – and reading them the riot act.
It needs to be an exercise in enforcing accountability across the system and not one of spreading it around and diffusing it. When everyone is responsible for getting something done, then nobody is.
It is hard to judge sometimes whether the lack of accountability in the Irish public service is for self-protection, or part of a wider political game – or a bit of both. In a document published this week by the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council – which advises the Government – departments were asked what they had done in response to recommendations the council had made since 2020.
In the area of infrastructure – housing, energy, water and so on – the majority were reported to be “in progress”. This is a classic departmental phrase. It could mean policy is being relentlessly pushed ahead. Or that someone is considering writing a memo. It tells us precisely nothing. It gives no calculation of the cost of delay. But once things are “in process”, all is fine.
In the same vein, the Department of Housing responded to the housing commission’s report last summer by saying that 70 per cent of its recommendations were either already “implemented, partially implemented or under way”. This was in response to a report which called for a “radical reset” of policy.
The Government now needs to decide whether it is really “up” for such a reset and the inevitable noses it would put out of joint, both within the system and more widely. There is political risk here. But the risk of letting things wander on much as they are – throwing money at the problem and hoping that it sticks – may be even greater. As Einstein allegedly said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
