INSTITUTIONAL FAILURES ARE RIFE

THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN IRISH EXAMINER OCTOBER 26th 2018

In the overall scheme of things, Ireland is a tiny country with a population of just 4.7 million people, albeit a population that is rising strongly. As a country we do many things well, such as attracting foreign direct investment, providing a decent enough education to our children, and we are pretty good at tourism as demonstrated by the fact that this year is likely to see another record number of overseas visitors coming into the country. We have also produced some world-class companies such as CRH, Smurfit Kappa, Glanbia and Ryanair. In recent days the Taoiseach boasted/joked that Ireland would be able to help out the UK after Brexit. I hope he was joking, because the one thing we cannot afford to be in this country is arrogant. We have way too many institutional failures to even contemplate arrogance.
On the debit side of the balance sheet, there are a lot of issues that we seem incapable of dealing with.
In terms of minding our environment and meeting our international environmental obligations, the country just does not cut the muster and unfortunately is languishing towards the bottom of the EU league table. Ireland will go nowhere close to achieving its Carbon emission targets and we will then be exposed to potentially very significant EU fines, or at least I hope that is what will happen, given our abject failure and unwillingness to tackle the issue in a meaningful way. The total failure to address the issue in the recent extremely populist budget, is proof positive of this fact.
This week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that 38 towns and villages across the State are discharging raw sewage into the environment, and 28 large towns and cities are discharging inadequately treated sewage into the environment. Is this acceptable in a supposed first-world economy? I think not.
The ongoing failure to provide a broadband service remotely approaching acceptable standards across many parts of the country is also a total joke, but unfortunately one that has serious consequences for regional businesses across the country. The recent political controversy over this issue is just the latest instalment in what has been a tale of woe and gross ineptitude stretching back over many years.
The housing situation is another very significant debit entry on the national balance sheet. Having built thousands of houses in the run up to the crash, unfortunately many of which were in the wrong locations, we then virtually stopped building for a number of years, despite the fact that natural population growth was never likely to die away. We now have a serious crisis in supplying owner-occupied and rental housing and it is starting to do significant damage to the economy and its competitiveness. Earlier this week we were treated to a story about thousands of local authority properties lying idle and unoccupied. This is totally unacceptable. The responsible local authorities need to ensure that such houses turn over and are occupied within a matter of weeks. Perhaps that is too much to ask for, but I remain to be convinced.
On the health side, there is also a litany of failure. Hospital waiting lists are at unacceptably high levels, people are dying waiting for treatments, the primary healthcare system is creaking at the edges and is set to get much worse as the supply of GPs dwindles, and important regional cities such as Waterford cannot provide cardiac care at weekends. I could go on, but it is clear that despite all of the money we throw at the health service, the ability, or lack of it, to deliver an acceptable service is quite depressing. If we cannot deliver an adequate service at the moment, one shudders to think about what it will be like over the coming years as the population ages at a significant pace.
Predictably, some will argue that we simply do not spend enough money in addressing these issues, but there would appear to be little correlation between money expended and improved public services.
On cannot but jump to the conclusion that our institutional structures are all wrong and are not fit for purpose, and that our political system and our political elites are letting us down very badly. Instead of being arrogant about what we achieve, we should recognise and address that which we appear incapable of achieving.