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Leinster House bicycle shed

A culture of managerial impunity

Letters to the Editor. Illustration: Paul Scott
The Irish Times - Letters to the Editor.

Sir, – Justine McCarthy writes: “Whoever thought €336,000 was money well spent on a bike shed must be held accountable. Otherwise the joke is on us” (“The bike shelter is a parable for all that Ireland does badly”, Opinion & Analysis, September 6th).

I hate to disappoint Justine. There will be no accountability, that is accountability of senior public service managers, as officially defined in a Department of Public Expenditure and Reform paper in January 2014: “The original and long-standing core meaning of accountability and its conventional usage within the governmental system in Ireland (and other Westminster-type parliamentary democracies) is the formal obligation to submit to a mechanism designed to achieve external scrutiny in explaining and justifying past conduct and actions, with the possibility of facing consequences”.

What Ireland does really badly is the last word in this definition. There are rarely consequences, beyond perhaps a “development programme”, a sideways move into another job or, better still, promotion. A culture of managerial impunity is endemic in the public service, in the health service, policing, environmental damage, the mistreatment of horses and other domains.

The €336,000 spent on the bike shed is peanuts compared to the millions of euro squandered by the Office of Public Works in plain sight over the past decade, which make the political grandstanding about this latest howler entirely unconvincing. Ultimately our politicians are responsible for this immaturity of the institutions of State. – Yours, etc,

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EDDIE MOLLOY,

Rathgar,

Dublin 6.

Sir, – Nine years ago, I answered an advertisement by the Office of Public Works and applied for an apprenticeship course in carpentry. I thought the questions asked at the interview were irrelevant and certainly not what I expected. One of them was, did I know the annual budget of the OPW? Given the cost of the bicycle shed, had I known then what I know now, I could have answered that question: unlimited. – Yours, etc,

JAMIE GILLEN,

Stepaside,

Co Dublin.