We need to demonstrate a resolve to apply regulatory rules already there
Issued : Tuesday 9 March, 2010
Speech by Pat Rabbitte TD
Minister for Communications, Energy & Natural Resources
Speaking at Joint IPA/UPFA Conference ‘Good Governance: Values and Culture or Rules and Regulations?’ at the Institute of Public Administration, Dublin
I can’t remember which of Woody Allen’s movies had our hero on the Psychiatrists couch and no matter what question he was asked he would answer in terms of sexual imagery. I am bound to admit that when it comes to considering a subject like “Good Governance -Values and Culture or Rules and Regulations”, I have a related problem. I cannot avoid viewing it through the prism of politics. I fully appreciate that, no more than sex, it would be impolite in a forum like this to introduce politics into this examination of what constitutes good governance.
However, ingenious as always, the public service has coined a synonym called “culture” which permits the vulgar and the anti-intellectual to get in under the wire. I am afraid there is a little bit of Fianna Fail in all of us and, after almost a quarter of a century of nearly uninterrupted one party rule, that includes the top echelons of the civil and public service. Further, there is in most of us more than a little bit of Irish Catholicism. The combination of the two is potentially lethal, contributing to a nod and wink culture which rules and regulations alone cannot control.
Any rational observer of the evolution, progress and collapse of the Celtic Tiger must conclude that this is our dominant culture. Even if it wanted to, our public service cannot function as if disconnected from that culture.
Therefore, I have a problem with this mornings formulation. To my mind it has an embedded logic that there is an abstract “good governance”, a holy grail which is “good”; that this is the essence of our crisis; and implicitly at least that we must have more rules and regulations, more and stronger commandments which we may find somewhat irksome at times but they will be “good for us”.
Of course this is not the essence of our crisis. Does anyone in this room believe that the collapse of our banking system is due to an absence of rules and regulations? I venture to suggest that we all know that the banks are in crisis because the rules and regulations were not applied.
Why? Well we may not all be agreed on that. But we have just been denied a public inquiry by the Dail that would see these kind of questions teased out in public view. At a minimum it would have been cathartic and would make it somewhat easier to enlist public support for the recovery measures that are inevitable.
Does anyone believe that the recent shenanigans at FAS happened because of an absence of rules and regulations?
As I understand it, it was FAS’ own internal auditor who brought to light the waste and excesses being engaged in but every effort was made to suppress the outcome, withhold it from the board and penalise the author. Would more elaborate rules and regulations have prevented that or was it the inevitable reflection of the dominant culture?
Did the dominant culture not go so far as to change the law to facilitate the more serious excesses of the Dublin Docklands Authority?
The Irish public service cannot quarantine itself – or be quarantined – from the dominant culture. Democracy as George Lee discovered is a messy, imperfect business but it is still better than any of the alternatives. Democracy functions best where power is rotated at reasonable intervals (in the polity as a whole and not just within the Green Party). Otherwise public service organisations become infected by the conventional wisdom of the day and governance suffers as, for example, happened in Aer Rianta a few years ago when the Board became the focus of in-house conflict between two competing factions in the same party.
I am therefore reluctant to sign up to a New Project which sees the solution to what the brochure describes as “the many recent crises in governance” as more elaborate rules and stricter regulation. For example I see very little wrong with the Department of Finance’s Code of Practice for the Governance of State Bodies – perhaps if anything they are too elaborate. The major deficit I am convinced is in application and enforcement. If we can tackle regulatory capture I am all for it. I doubt there is a good governance grail and its pursuit is chasing a chimera.
Unless we can demonstrate a resolve to apply without fear or favour the regulatory rules that are there and unless we are committed to nurturing the age old public service values, we are wasting our time trying to improve on the rules that are there. It is unlikely that we will achieve this while those who blatantly, and on serious issues, neglected their responsibilities or who sought to subvert those who did discharge their responsibilities, walk away with pension and severance arrangements unimaginable from the point of view of the ordinary taxpayer.
One final point – the tendency within the Civil and Public Service for collective self-defence, no matter how grave the lapse, should not be included in the public service values that we want to see enhanced.
