Michael Brennan and Brendan Keenan: Coalition has little to show for promised seeds of change
Michael Brennan - The politics
It has been a mixed first year in office for Taoiseach Enda Kenny's government, but its failure to fulfil many promises far outweighs its achievements so far. Three non-achievements, in particular, stand out.
1) No justice over the banking disaster
There is a still a strong public demand for a proper banking inquiry -- and the referendum on inquiry powers for Dail committees last October was meant to make this possible. But it was poorly explained by the Government and there were widespread fears that it would lead to jackbooted TDs kicking down doors to drag innocent people out of their beds. The Dail's Public Accounts committee is now going to mount its own banking inquiry -- but it will not have the power to make "findings of fact" against those current and former bankers it calls as witnesses.
In the meantime, the Programme for Government promised that "rogue bankers and all those that misappropriate or embezzle funds are properly pursued for their crimes". There have been no signs of any bankers in the dock yet -- and last week we had the spectacle of the Director of Corporate Enforcement Paul Appleby trying to take early retirement.
Anglo Irish Bank has got a new name -- yet it is still spending vast amounts of money on paying the wages of staff who have nothing to do. No sign of that redundancy scheme yet, though.
2) Telling us what's going on in NAMA
Finance Minister Michael Noonan famously said during last year's election campaign that changing NAMA was like trying to "unscramble an egg".
But this enormously powerful agency, which holds loans once worth €74bn, has so far been spared from the radical changes that the Government promised.
It said there would be the "highest standards of transparency" in the operation of NAMA.
Nobody could say that is the case. We were promised a reduction in costs yet it now has 200 staff on average salaries of €100,000 each. To add insult to injury, it is paying salaries of up to €200,00 to the very developers whose greed and gross misjudgments helped to destroy the national finances.
We have been promised change at board level in NAMA and Mr Noonan is getting a new advisory group. But given the huge role that NAMA plays in the State's financial future, it had better happen very quickly.
3) Getting bang for buck from hospital consultants
Hospital consultants famously dismissed the offer of a €250,000 per year contract as "Mickey Mouse money" at the height of the boom.
Yet most signed up to the lucrative contracts now worth around €220,000 and play a crucial role in the health service.
The Government had promised to draw up a new consultant's contract with reduced pay. But Health Minister James Reilly has taken this off the table in return for the co-operation of consultants with new reforms.
But the HSE's own statistical system has found that hospital consultants are still treating far more private patients than they should. Instead of the required 80pc public patients and 20pc private patients, in some hospitals the percentage is almost 50pc private patients.
Brendan Keenan - The economy
NOT since Fianna Fail first took office in the 1930s has any government had such a mandate for change as the present Coalition.
Yet, one year on, there is little sense that the system is any different from the one the voters so emphatically rejected.
It is foolish to imagine any government could deliver growth in today's conditions, with a massive budget deficit and a full-blown euro crisis. The Coalition should not be blamed for failing to create jobs; but it can be blamed for giving the impression that it thinks it can.
The Government could certainly do something about unemployment, with a full revamp of training and placement programmes, and reform of the social welfare system's interaction with employment.
Policies have been announced and promises made, but progress is hard to discern. Even if progress is made, it can never compensate for the 30,000 jobs which the Government plans to cut from the public service under the Croke Park deal.
There is lots of evidence the Irish public service is inefficient and highly-paid. There is little that it is over-staffed, although specific areas may well be. Yet, as Brendan Howlin admitted last week, fear of the trade unions persuaded the Government to continue the policy of trading jobs for pay.
The consequences of that will fall on the most vulnerable users of public services. If the programme fails to deliver -- as even some union leaders believe it probably will -- there will be emergency cuts in pay, but the damage will be hard to reverse.
One of the most striking failures is the failure to lead by example. Now that we know the true size of the economy, we can see that the salaries of senior politicians, civil servants, hospital consultants and others are almost laughably out of line. And it seems they will remain so.
On general spending, Mr Howlin's Department of Public Enterprise and Reform has been largely thwarted in its efforts to apply rational analysis. The ministerial rows over the Budget were the depressingly familiar mix of the cuts which were easiest to make and the ones which would be so unpopular that they might be reversed.
The Coalition has succeeded in meeting its budgetary targets. And it may very well succeed in its efforts to get assistance with the costs of the bank rescue. That could save up to €3bn a year in the end.
There is now a fighting chance that Ireland will not need a second bailout and could return to commercial borrowing in 2014. That would rightly be hailed as a great success and could give the Coalition the hope of a second term.
But the crash revealed that Ireland's problems go deeper than its wrecked finances. The failings of the political and administrative systems, and the lack of scrutiny and accountability for those failings, remain largely untouched.
It was possible to hope before the election that this near-terminal crisis would finally bring reform. Perhaps the Coalition's greatest failing, after its critical first year, is that so much looks so depressingly the same.
Irish Independent
