Consultants controversy proves there’s always a bit of a bad taste in the water

Harry McGee

Political World

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

The controversy that has arisen over the €50 million spent by Irish Water on consultants in the first year of its operation follows a long – if not particularly distinguished – tradition in Irish political life.

During the long tenure of the Fianna Fáil-led Government that lasted three terms, there were a number of similar situations that arose.

Remember the Bertie Bowl? That was never a humble project to begin with – a new national stadium would be the legacy that Bertie Ahern would leave to posterity – but what modesty was attached to it at the start soon disappeared. Within months the overall costs of the project was being ratcheted up from a few hundred million and soon talked turned to the 80,000 capacity stadium costing anything up to €1 billion.

When politicians and journalists began probing the detail, it emerged that consultants to the project were being paid enormous fees. A feature of their contracts was that the more the project cost they more they would make.

Some of the people who were centrally involved with the project included people who could loosely come within the category of ‘golden circle’, a group of people favoured by Government.

Some €43 million had already been spent before the scheme was abandoned in 2002, with the Government rowing back and announcing two more modest projects – the Aviva Stadium in Lansdowne Road and the national sports campus in Abbotstown.

Then in Fianna Fáil’s second term we had PPARs. That experience has strong resonances now. A little like Irish Water, or Uisce Eireann, it was a case of a new body being created and amalgamating other bodies. In this case, it was the HSE which was taking over the functions of 11 regional health boards.PPARS was an attempt to take the 11 separate payrolls and human resource functions and centralise them.

Look, such an undertaking is no cakewalk. Nobody even knew at that stage how many people were employed in the health services. Was it 100,000 or 140,000 employees?  And every health board had different pay rates, different grades, different holiday arrangements, overtime arrangements and local agreements. And all of the health boards used different payroll and computer systems. So trying to amalgamate all that was never going to be easy.

But then outside companies were brought in to give advice and suddenly there was rampant spread of consultant-itis.  The job of work became ‘change management’ and the costs began to ramp up, from an initial €9 million to €140m when the scheme became the subject of public scrutiny in 2005, and hit the buffers. A few years later, and behind the scenes, the scheme was resuscitated under a new title and its costs had risen to €200m by 2011.

The one that came to be most damaging politically was e-voting. Martin Cullen, then Minister for the Environment, announced in 2004 that we were getting rid of the peann luaidhe and ballot paper, and all voting in future would be done electronically. Before you could say ‘but is this good for democracy?’ he had gone off and bought the machines and software and the devil and all.

But then a concerned group of computer experts did a forensic examination of the software and uncovered some problems – the e-voting equivalent of the hanging chads. There was no paper trail for one and therefore no completely transparent way of verifying that the computers were counting votes correctly when an audit was conducted.

To cut a long story short, the project itself was postponed pending a review and was eventually shelved. In the meantime, the computers for casting votes were stored around the country. That created its own controversy with questions being asked about how certain individuals in certain places got the contracts for storing the computers, as well as the amount that some of them charged.

The overall cost amounted to €50 million before it was all called to a halt. By that time Cullen had moved on to another ministry and eventually to early retirement.