I’m sorry to report things aren’t going so well over at the NACECKF. Rumour has it this advisory body is to be abolished as part of the current round of government cutbacks and the place is a hotbed of speculation and hearsay. Staff members hold muttered conversations in corridors while grim-faced, tight-lipped managers convene at length in meeting rooms.
You’re unfamiliar with the NACECKF? It’s the National Advisory Consultative Executive Council for Kathy Foley. It’s my quango. It was set up a few years ago to further my strategic interests and to develop, promote and support guidelines on policies for best practice when dealing with me.
Concerned by rumblings on the grapevine, I popped into NACECKF’s swanky headquarters last week and found the chief executive cowering in his plushly-appointed office. “It’s true,” he whimpered. “It’s over. We’re done for. After everything we’ve accomplished, I can’t believe it. We had so many meetings. We set up steering committees, damn it. Our annual report was an inch thick. And we just paid millions for a new logo, because the one we got back in February wasn’t really communicating our core values…I mean, your core values.”
Okay, you got me. I don’t have a quango, or ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental body’. A ‘non-commercial semi-state body’ is another way of describing these unelected money sumps. But I may as well have one. There seem to be quangos for everything else, from food safety to Defence Forces canteens (yes, really). There are now more than 1,000 of the damn things, up from 80 in 1979. Not for much longer, however. The government has promised to get rid of a bunch of quangos and amalgamate others, in order to save €177m. While a cull is long overdue, the news was greeted by a chorus of self-important bleating from heads of quangos, each keen to point out their organisation does important work and the whole country would collapse without them.
In not-terribly stirring words to the Irish Times, Kevin Kelly, head of the Combat Poverty Agency, defended its existence: “We’re different from other groups in that we’re not a single issue organisation. We’re not coming at tackling poverty from an ideological perspective. We consider poverty at a broad level that considers complexities and dynamics. We provide independent evidence-based advice, that is not influenced by existing policy boundaries.”
Other organisations defended quangos. “What is the rush?” demanded Damien Peelo, the director of the Irish Traveller Movement, angry at the proposal to merge the Equality Authority, the Equality Tribunal, the Human Rights Commission and the Data Protection Commissioner.
The rush, Mr Peelo, is that government finances are messed up. The budget deficit will be €3-4 billion this year. Meanwhile, the country is infested by a plague of quangos — legions of agencies, authorities, bodies, commissioners, ombudsmen and taskforces, all encumbered with mission statements, charters and strategic plans, among other instruments of bureaucracy. In some government departments, 40% of the budget is controlled by quangos.
An OECD report released in April concluded we had about one quango for every 5,000 people. The reality is closer to one for every 4,000, but the government doesn’t actually know how many there are. Bertie Ahern said earlier this year there were “too many by half” but, cleverly, didn’t mention half of what.
But there are so many it’s hard to know which body is responsible for what. In health, education, transport and every other sector, there are multiple quangos with unclear and overlapping mandates.
Remember that oft-lampooned lament of the eco-warrior, “Won’t somebody think of the trees?” Irish eco-warriors can rest easy; we have plenty of people thinking about the trees. There is Coillte, for a start, and the people at COFORD, which is the National Council for Forest Research and Development, not to mention Comhairle na Tuaithe (the Countryside Council).
More people are thinking of the fish. This is an island nation with a beleaguered fishing industry, so I see why we need a national authority solely focused on fish-related issues. I am stumped, however, as to why we need all of the following: An Bord Iascaigh Mhara (Irish Sea Fisheries Board), eight separate regional fisheries boards, eight fisheries co-op societies, a Sea Fisheries Protection Authority, a Marine Institute, an Aquacultural Licensing Appeals Board and a National Salmon Commission.
Across the board, the quango system is bloated, wasteful and inefficient. Too many of these organisations have been hiding behind glossy reports and obfuscating jargon, presumably to conceal the fact that they are often pretty pointless entities.
Credit where it is due, Fine Gael has been calling for a quango slash-and-burn for a long time. Earlier this year, it produced an impressive 83-page policy document called Streamlining Government. This contained the most detailed list of quangos anyone has yet managed to assemble and included all of the breakaway “sons of quangos”, a phrase that conjures up the cover of a pulp fiction novel featuring slime-covered monsters lumbering out of swamps: “The people thought they were safe, but a new terror stalked the land…SONS OF QUANGOS!”
Fine Gael’s report also drew attention to the ‘jobs for the boys’ malaise. Almost 2,500 positions on quangos are in the gift of government ministers. No interviews, qualifications or background checks are necessary. No wonder quango bosses rush to proclaim the importance of their existence.
Commenting on quango cutbacks in health, where at least five of these bodies are to be subsumed into larger organisations, an anonymous source told the Irish Medical Times: “This is only round one in the bonfire of the quangos.”
If this is true, it’s good news. In principle, quangos usually have laudable goals. After all, no one is vehemently anti-equality or anti-combatting poverty or anti-whatever it is the Opticians Board does, but if we are to have government-funded semi-state bodies, they need to prove they are necessary and provide value for money. Right now, shelling out for the Combat Poverty Agency to consider the “complexities and dynamics” of poverty is a luxury we cannot afford.
