Mandarins in Finance who failed 'should go'
Burton attacks bureaucrats who didn't notice looming crisis
Sunday June 28 2009
Senior mandarins in the Department of Finance should "consider their positions" in the aftermath of the damning IMF report on the Irish economy, according to Labour's finance spokeswoman Joan Burton.
In a tough message to the top bureaucrats in Finance Ms Burton said that "any new government will have to engage in a root and branch reform of the department''.
"Unless Brian Cowen acted contrary to official advice we have to ask was anyone at home in the Department of Finance at this time or were they so [busy] glorying in the Celtic Tiger boom that they simply didn't notice what was going on."
Burton's attack will come as another blow to the embattled department which has been roundly criticised by the IMF and academic economists over its inability to produce "any estimate for aggregate bank losses'' nine months after the banking collapse occurred.
The Sunday Independent has, however, learnt that the department has come under pressure over its perceived failings from two other major institutions of the State.
In a revelation about the dysfunctional nature of the response to the biggest economic crisis the country has faced since the 1930s, senior financial sources have told the Sunday Independent that relations between Finance and the Revenue Commissioners have almost entirely broken down.
One senior source said: "Revenue officials are scathing about the quality of the Department of Finance. Some people in Revenue don't even talk to Finance because of their incapacity."
The source added that relations were equally fraught between the department and the National Treasury Management Agency.
Tensions between the Department of Finance and the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) surfaced in public recently when its boss Dr Michael Somers claimed publicly that the NTMA had no idea what role they were supposed to play in setting up of Nama, the Government agency that will acquire toxic property assets.
Relations between the department and the NTMA are said to be "poisonous".
Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Joan Burton said it is now "increasingly clear there is a critical shortage of people in Finance who are qualified to carry the enormity of the task that needs to be done to save the country".
In a warning that echoed concerns recently raised by former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, Ms Burton said that in a "very politicised" department whose middle ranks are now seriously demoralised "there is no sense of any overweening intellectual authority such as a Whitaker, who might guide the country and the Minister, can actually be found in its ranks."
It has also emerged that the Government is refusing to release potentially critical advice that Brian Cowen received about the state of the Irish economy while he was the minister for finance -- unless Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny plays over €6,000 as a "retrieval fee" for the information.
The information relates to the contents of a series of critical secret meetings between Mr Cowen when he was minister for finance, the OECD and the IMF in April 2008. The meetings occurred prior to a major OECD report on the state of the Irish public services and shortly before Mr Cowen assumed the Taoiseach's office. The subsequent report claimed the Irish public service was uncoordinated, lacked strategic vision and suffered from poor competence at senior level.
"We simply wanted to find out what was being said to the Minister by expert economists at a critical time for the public finances" said a Fine Gael source. "We want to know if Mr Cowen was being told that there was a real and immediate danger of things going badly wrong unless something was done."
The Fine Gael spokesman said: "In fact the reality which is obvious to all now is that Mr Cowen's budgets turned us into the economic basket case of the West."
Now the Opposition want to the find out what went on at these meetings and why there has been such difficulty in releasing the documentation surrounding the various discussions with the OECD and the IMF.
"Within Leinster House it is increasingly clear just how fragile Mr Cowen is when it comes to his own personal record," the spokesman said.
- John Drennan
