Rich Country, Broken State

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1:41If you've ever asked yourself, why can we not have the metro? Why can we not have the hospital? Why can we not have the housing? Why can we not have all these basic, basic elements that societies require to function? And why do we pay tax for a government that doesn't seem to be able to deliver these things? If you ever ask yourself this question, this podcast is for you because we are going to talk to Sinead O'Sullivan. Sinead, you will know, has been on the podcast a couple of times over the last five or six months, highlighting the ludicrous inefficiencies that exist in Irish public delivery.

2:18Basically, the question is, what is the government for? That is the question in today's podcast. We are now going to go straight with no bells or whistles. John and I will have a chat afterwards. No bells or whistles. We're going to go straight to Sinead O'Sullivan. Just when you thought she had gone away, she has not gone away. Of course she's not gone away. Sinead O'Sullivan, who made an amazing debut on the podcast a couple of months ago with her vituperative attacks on, but actually very, very precise analysis of the dilemmas facing Ireland. we asked the question at the beginning of this year, is Ireland actually one of the worst, maybe the worst governed rich country in the world?

3:00And by that, we meant the gap between the amount of money that's coming in, the fiscal position, the extraordinary bonanza that is the corporate tax windfall and the lamentable delivery of public services that most of the Europeans expect from a social democracy and the fact that Ireland cannot, does not, will not, or has not delivered at any level in comparison to wealthy North Western European countries, just taking it as it is. Sinead has an amazing sub-stack called This Time is Different. And in the last couple of days, she's written a piece called Ireland's Delivery Inability. And I want to talk exactly about this because this will make your blood boil if you are from the benighted isle that is Ireland.

3:50Sinead, lovely to see you. How are you? I'm good. I'm good, David. Thanks for having me back. Although I'm not sure that anyone actually thought I was going anywhere. Maybe they hoped so. That's exactly, exactly. Sinead, you have written a piece called Ireland's Delivery Inability. First of all, explain the top line. What does that mean? And then give us some examples and we'll get into the meat of the issue. Yeah, I mean, it really comes down to the fact that we as a country are unable to deliver. And really, I'm talking about infrastructure or projects here, the things that really kind of, you know, as I outlined in previous episodes, that make our society function and our economy work and people's lives just feel like they're actually living their lives.

4:37Now, in the piece I outline, and I actually had to pick apart and really think about which ones I wanted to include, but there are so many it would surprise you that I there are some really good ones that I left out I just did not have space to put in there but David let's talk about the buses oh my god the buses I mean in Ireland we bought 132 buses that we cannot use they are green buses electric buses because we have no way of powering them and this one example is such a good example of you know buying the laptop before getting the charger, except at some kind of scale that feels unfathomable to understand.

5:19I would say for those outside of the government, but I'm pretty sure the people in the department where this happened are also confused, which asks a deeper question, which is who the hell is signing off on any of this stuff? So let's talk. So Ireland in the last, let's say, 18 months bought a fleet. Let's just think about this. Somebody in the state signed off to buy a fleet of electric buses. That's number one. The objective is we want to be environmentally compliant. One of the pieces of this is we're going to buy buses, those buses are going to replace the diesel buses, and they're going to be electric.

5:53Correct. And what you're saying is we buy the buses, but we don't use them because nobody has figured out that these buses have to be charged. Yes. Our power source is incompatible with these 132 buses, which, by the way, are working towards the larger goal of becoming environmentally friendly, which is a goal of kind of headline number that we are about to miss so badly that we are about to be fined billions of euros by the EU in this. So let's look at, you know, the 132 buses. Where are they at the minute? Well, I mean, to add insult to injury, because we can't actually use them, they are rotting away.

6:34But guess what? 132 buses are big. These are like, these are big, big things that you have to put somewhere. And guess what? Space is expensive in Ireland. So we are paying 7 million euros to park the 132 buses that we cannot use. while we keep using the buses that we shouldn't be using anymore. And actually, people will genuinely think I'm lying when I say this. But the last bus I got in Dublin went on fire. And I had to get off it. So, like, this is just incredible. Lucky you did. No, look, you've also highlighted a train system that doesn't work, a metro that's never built, a hospital that's never finished.

7:17Let's go through a couple of the lists of these things And then let us try and analyze what's going on and try and do what most people are trying to get their heads around, which is the people who are making these decisions are not stupid. Something else is going on. So let's give us a few more of these examples that you were trying to get your head around. Yeah. So let's stick with public transport, which is what, you know, one of the things I really, really, really want Ireland to get right. So we spent 50 million euros on some fancy new control system for our trains that was apparently going to help control them all a bit better.

7:55But we actually abandoned that project near the end because people realized, well, we don't actually know if the system is actually going to work or not. So we've spent an additional 20 million euros to be able to keep using the old system because the new one that we had already paid for did not work. so there's 70 million euros and nothing has changed our system is still aging and getting worse and the arts council here you mentioned oh this is a painful one because for many reasons but the arts council were supposed to spend three million euros updating an IT system I mean again it's the arts council right so I'm not sure how complex this IT system could possibly have been This is not like some sort of, you know, vast medical cross hospital, cross jurisdiction.

8:46I mean, it's the Arts Council, which manages projects. So the 3 million euros that it was supposed to spend was halted at around 6 million euros unfinished. So again, you know, we spent nearly double and got none of what we needed. Okay, so these are examples. And the big one, of course, I presume, is the children's hospital, which is the one that most people look at and think, how come this children's hospital has doubled or tripled or quadrupled in budgetary overrun and still isn't open? So what do you think is going on? Yeah. And, you know, it's funny because I've kind of spent a long time thinking about these problems in Ireland.

9:29And in fact, I used to sit on the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Arts. And so I've kind of seen some of these issues play out firsthand. And then I myself got involved with trying to do some very small and what should have been very easy reforms in Ireland to kind of play around with this problem myself and to get a look on the inside of the system and see what actually happens when all of the incentives are aligned and you kind of, you know, everyone is sure to want this reform to happen. Why is it not happening or why is it stalling? And this was just, just let me interrupt you, this is the road safety you're involved in.

10:07You're actually involved in the road safety initiative to make the road safe. Yeah. And, you know, as you said in the piece, this is a reform that there's no opposition to, that everybody's behind, that should be an open goal in effect. Right. So in Ireland, we are enormously, again, going back to public transport, we are enormously reliant on cars, which was a fatal policy error we made many years ago. So there is a massive car lobby in Ireland. However, even the one big lobby in Ireland is for road safety. So here you have vested interests that are actually aligned with what should be government mandates.

10:47And yet, and yet, I have wrapped, well, I've been unable to wrap my head around this for multiple months. And I have tried nearly everything to reform this and kind of pulling my sleeves up and getting involved with the politicians and with the lobbies and with the 10 million different people that are involved in Irish road safety and realizing that it's impossible to do because no one has the mandate to do it. And this kind of leads to the much bigger example I gave in my piece around slant occur. Because what I had kind of independently come to, I then decided to look at other much bigger reforms that have been tried in the past and failed.

11:32And the failings that I had experienced, although to an incredibly smaller degree, were identical to what has publicly been said, over and over and over again, people screaming at the top of their lungs saying, hey, this is never going to work because of A, B, and C, and this needs to change, and nothing changed. And so the mechanism, as I've outlined in the piece, really comes down to four, what I've called blocks, that kind of all need to be present or four different aspects of reform that need to happen in order for a reform to actually hold or to take shape. So when we say reform, because reform is one of those kind of very, very management consultee words that has seeped into the English language in the last two decades and can mean anything to anybody at any time.

12:22And I mean, I even see your man in England this day, Andy Burnham, all he keeps saying is reform, reform, reform. That's like, we're going to reform this, we're going to reform that, right? So it's one of those catchalls, right? Let's talk about, this is about delivery of public services. This is what we're talking about. So be it health, be it education, be it housing, any of these issues, right? So let's talk, you've identified four locks that you speak of that need to be present and are not. Yeah. Any initiative to work. So explain them to me. Yeah. And you know, none of them are complicated.

13:00I mean, when I say them, people will think, oh my God, like what she's saying is something that we all know. But I'll say it anyway, because it's worth saying over and over again. The first one is that there's no named person or a kind of agent of delivery that has the mandate, but importantly, the responsibility and the ability to carry out those reforms. Now, again, my personal experience on the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the board of directors have the responsibility to run the museum, but none of the actual authority to do that. And this is what you see across the enormous size of the state, which is both government agencies, the civil service, and then literally thousands of NGOs that participate in the delivery of public goods and services and infrastructure on the state's behalf.

13:54So if there is no one person whose job it is to kind of stand up and say, I have the responsibility and the mandate and the ability and authority to do this well then no one's going to be able to do it and this is this kind of goes very much against what we see even in the UK. So are you saying that nobody in the Irish public service will lose a job and or get paid more lose a job if they fail or get paid more if they succeed there is not one person what you're saying is nobody is carrying the can on any public initiative. Can you name a single person who's been fired from an NGO or the Irish government for screwing things up?

14:38Not even screwing things up, but like just not getting them right. I mean, it's outstanding. So exactly, no one is incentivized. It's not even an incentives problem. It's a structural problem that they're not able to do it. And in the example I give in Sláinte Care, because of where those people were sitting within the system they were trying to reform, they were actually reporting to the very entities that they were trying to restructure. So, I mean, I'm not sure if anyone's tried to fire their own boss before, but that's never happened as far as I've ever seen. So what you're saying is the people who were involved in Solange Care were actually reporting to the HSE, which was the very institution they were supposed to be changing.

15:27Correct. So that's the number one lock. Number one lock is nobody has a mandate. Number two lock, what is it? Yeah, it's that the Irish government can't actually see the system that it's trying to transform. Let me just explain a little bit more about that. Ireland is quite unique in that because, again, of how the state kind of came into being, that we very, very early on, you know, before the state had even properly formed, we had loads of different entities that were providing services like health care, education, to people without the state's mandate. And so when the state was formed, the state kind of grew up around these entities.

16:06And so you kind of had this dual system in the government, which is very unique, by which you had these kind of NGOs that delivered things plus the government that delivered other things. The problem is that the size of the NGOs in number and in terms of their responsibility is so huge that the government, even if it wants to reform what the NGOs deliver, cannot see what they're actually doing, how much they're spending, and all the rest of it. Give me a concrete example of that. Because I remember the biggest NGO I was when I was a kid was the Catholic Church. That was a proper NGO, right? That was a non-governmental organization that if you fucked with them, they really, they can mess with your head, right?

16:50But like a present day sort of example of this sort of, it's almost like a tumor growing within the system. I mean, there are literally 2 ,000, more than 2 ,000 examples. But like in healthcare, for example, so much, I mean, health services is such a big part of this. So, which is why Islantic Care was so urgent and necessary and never ended up happening. But like if you look at private hospitals that actually get paid, and again, we've talked on this podcast about this, the state will pay more money of taxpayers to give it to a private entity to do on behalf of the government but never build the capability itself.

17:30Healthcare is where this is more prevalent than nearly anywhere else. So you have all of these kind of NGOs in the healthcare sector doing private, whether it's private MRIs or private breast checks or all the rest of it, because the state didn't do that. Well, guess what? It's really hard for the state to reform a private hospital because guess what? The stakeholders or the shareholders can just say, F off, you're not my boss. And this is essentially what happens if you try to reform hundreds. And in the case of healthcare, you would need to do hundreds and hundreds of reforms to individual organizations to get one mandate passed.

18:09So it's incredibly hard. The government literally cannot see what they're trying to transform. And your third lock is the idea that everything is at full capacity, so there's never a right time to address the inefficiencies, and therefore they're not addressed. Yeah. So obviously healthcare, this is, you know, one of the biggest examples is, again, solange care. And this is where it's kind of, you know, you can say, well, the pandemic was not the right time to transform or reform a system that is a health system. Right, right. Totally. Right. And you kind of look at that and you say, okay, I'm somewhat believing you.

18:46But again, this is where it becomes uncanny. David, like literally everything that I've seen is identical to this. Guess what I saw in my silly little, well, not that it's silly, it's very important, but much smaller in scale reform attempts to Irish road safety. The Minister for Transport quite literally said, we are not going to reform Irish road safety because we don't have time, because too many people will die on the roads while we are transforming that system. So i.e. there is no slack in the system. And yet, two years later, without those reforms, more people than ever have died on Irish roads.

19:26So it's the same thing everywhere, that we just don't have enough slack in the system, supposedly, to do the reforms in the first place. And your final lock is? Yeah, this is one that is kind of near universal. I mean, it's kind of the outcome of the structure of government in Western democracies, which is that most reforms are not made in a way such that they survive progressive governments. And it's funny because I was actually discussing this with a friend of both of ours. and I believe someone who's been on your podcast a few times, Eric Lonergan, last week. Yes, he has indeed. And so we were talking about Andy Burnham and the UK reforms and we were quite literally talking about what those mechanisms would be that could survive.

20:12I mean, I don't know. Are we going to get another 10 prime ministers in the UK in the next year? But basically... Who knows? Who knows? Let's go back. So basically what we're saying is, number one, right, that we're talking about Ireland. We're talking about the fact that we have buckets of money and we have no delivery. Number one, nobody has the mandate, the authority and the responsibility. So when we talk about reform, we see a glossy brochure, but nobody's name is at the bottom saying, I stick my hand up, it's on me. Okay, that's number one. Number two, there's no actual roadmap because the state doesn't know what it's trying to reform because there are so many NGOs and private and public competing with each other.

20:53Okay. Number three, there's no slack in the system. So every time we try to do something, the easy excuse is, now is not the right time. And number four, these reforms and this ongoing effort to change the way we do business is militated against by the fact that we've five-year governments and we've two-year this and three-year that, and nobody's sticking around in 10 years' time to see the thing done. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. Right. Okay. Right. So let us... How good are you feeling about this now? I think you've got great expressions and things like ruled by nobody and all this.

21:31So let's go a little bit deeper into this, right? Solange Care was supposed to do exactly what? I can't even remember at this stage. And if I can't remember, and I'm supposed to be in this business, I don't know what the average punter on the street can actually remember dealing with it. It was supposed to reform the health service. Right. I mean, one would assume that any health reform in any Western country or developed country is going to streamline it, reduce costs, and increase capacity. So in whatever way, the specific mechanisms of delivering that in Ireland, it didn't happen, and we've seen multiple failures since, not only increasing, but like ballooning costs of healthcare to stay against a backdrop of much, much worse outcomes year on year.

22:17So nil poids for slant of care, unfortunately. Mellorassement, it did not happen. It's gone, it's dead, it's buried. David McWilliams can't even remember what the hell it was. All right, so let's talk about, so we've outlined the problem. We've outlined what needs to be done. Let's diagnose, let's get deep in. What is at its core? What can change, what has to change in order for this country to use the money that's coming in sagely and effectively? Well, many things, because you're now in the position of needing to reform the system that cannot reform the many things that it cannot see or do or whatever.

23:00But let's talk about one, right? And this is probably the most important one in terms of being able to fix a lot of things that are unique to Ireland, because a lot of people have correctly said, well, everywhere kind of struggles with these things. Yeah, we know that. And most public services, you know, I mean, we recently did a piece on France. French public services are far more efficient than Ireland. It's a bigger country. There's economies of scale. And yet the French complain all the time. German trains don't run on time. Now that's a first, right? Italian medical service. So these are endemic to all countries, but let's talk about specific ones to Ireland.

23:34Right. So I'm going to start with, and probably the one that we should focus most of our attention on is accountability. The very first one, that there is a person whose job it is to do something and that this is going to shock everyone. They do it. They do the thing, right? Like that's it. That we could turn into a 400 page book, But that's it, really. So how has the system evolved that there is no accountability? And I think that, you know, anybody who's listening, who's worked in even large private organizations, which become enormously bureaucratic, find the same thing. But certainly in the public sector, my time many years ago as a young man working in the central bank, I was quite shocked by the fact that I'd come out of like, like, yeah, you come out of university, you've got to do exams, you've got to turn up, you've got to try and do your best.

24:23You've got a SWAT, you know, all that sort of thing. So you're coached in a sort of, you do the leaving search of it. You know, all the way up through school, there is a competitive edge going on. And then you go into this place and you go to university and there's a competitive edge. And you're la-la-la, you're competitive edge. And you go into that, even if you're working as a waiting on tables, there's a competitive edge. You've got to wait on the table. And if you don't do it, you get fired. And you go into the public surface and suddenly that just disappears. That disappears. And there's jobs worth and there's job creation and there's all sorts of things going on in politics.

24:51How has that evolved? It's interesting. And I think it really comes down to this discrepancy between who works for the government and who doesn't, right? Like on the face of it, this is such a boring thing I'm going to talk about. But it explains so much of this kind of dysfunction. you basically have a lot of kind of NGOs or people or whatever organizations in the that are kind of functioning as a state of Ireland but they're not the state right and they are uncontrollable not that they're out of control but that they could not be controlled if the state tried for the reasons that we've mentioned which means that the state can only make accountable the politicians or the civil servants or the government side of things, which control the parts that they can do, right?

25:39And that is mostly expenditure. So when you see somebody called before the public accounts committee, the question that they're asked is, did you overspend on something? It is never did you deliver that thing? Because the delivery is nearly always outside of the official remit of the government in this kind of bulging NGO kind of government, but not quite government sector. And so within the space of never being able to control the outcome, why would you try? And again, we go back to incentives. Like I, you know, I work at a hedge fund. This is like the polar opposite of the Irish government, because every minute of my day, there is a profit and loss or, you know, there is accountability directly to the activities that I do, right?

26:28So that's something very far extreme in one direction. And then you have the Irish government on the other side. But like, it's the fact that they, it's out of their control. And so there's no attempt to control it, I imagine is most of that dysfunction. And so A, nobody's controlling delivery. B, nobody sticks their hands up. C, nobody gets rewarded or punished for anything. So it's kind of government of nothingness. No, I use the word nothingness a lot, because I don't even know what other word to put in there. Like, how do you describe something that doesn't exist? It's really baffling. So like, I've worked with governments all over the world.

27:10And in those governments, I have genuinely worked with some of the smartest people I've ever met. I love working with governments. I love what they do. I love the responsibility that they have. And yet in Ireland, the political class just do not have, well, firstly, the accountability, right? But then going down to a kind of more, you know, getting into that. So, for example, in the UK, UK delivery of infrastructure is a trained profession. In Ireland, it's whoever turns up for the job within the political class. And that person might not be able to spell the words that they're trying to reform.

27:53Like that is a crude way to put it. but like we don't have any sort of expertise nor do we have any structural way of making sure that the people with that expertise are in the room when things are happening. And yet the UK has kind of some slightly lamentable records in public infrastructure. The great one is the H2. I mean, this is the great example. The UK like Ireland is blessed by being reasonably flat, right? So you're not like you're trying to build trains in Croatia or in Switzerland where you've got to tunnel through mountains, et cetera. Ireland's flat. It should be easy to build a rail system, right?

28:29There are no mountains between Dublin and Galway. There are feckle mountains between Cork and Dublin, right? Like, it's flat. So this is not an engineering dilemma. So the UK H2, again, quite a good example. From what I read and from what my English mates just say, it's one of the greatest disasters that has ever been tried to be built in the UK. It's a high-speed link between Birmingham. is Manchester in London or Birmingham in London? Yeah, and I, well, I think it was then reduced to Birmingham and is now reduced to a 50-mile high-speed pass motorway, which you're probably going to be able to drive faster past.

29:04I wanted you to bring that up for one reason, right? The HS2 project is perfectly good at this. People will say, well, if the UK has this great system of accountability where they have, you know, delivery is a trained profession and Ireland doesn't, explain to me how they weren't able to do HS2, to which I would say this named person and this accountability part is one of four locks, right? So HS2 did not fail because it had one person that was accountable and that's all it takes. But that's a pretty important part of it. And it is the lowest hanging fruit in Ireland. We actually are probably somewhat similar to the UK in terms of, you know, the fourth lock, which is that, you know, can we get our policies to survive multiple governments?

29:50We are pretty similar to them when it comes to the fact that we have no slack. We are decidedly worse when it comes to accountability against politicians who rotate governments. And let's talk about the fact that the Irish political class do great PowerPoint presentations on the reforms that they think somebody ultimately else should enact, but that they would like to see. And you hear more about these reforms that they wish, actually, once they leave government in the opinion pages of newspapers, David, that you and I write in. So what do you say? Look, let's come back to it. Because, I mean, first of all, the seriousness is the following.

30:34We have, take the housing market. We have, I think it's now recognized as maybe the worst housing crisis in any developed country in terms of our inability to deliver houses. we have reams and reams of reports and glossy brochures of what we're going to do. And in five years' time, we're going to have this. So what we get is, you know, something's announced, RTE News, nine o 'clock, some minister's on, and there's a lovely glossy brochure with a lovely map of Ireland. They like a map, right? And the map's red and blue, and there's like lines, right? And it's as if we've never seen it before. We know what the island looks like, but then we've got red and blue lines, and it's going to be this and that.

31:13And then, of course, that little report dissipates whatever sort of social angst is and whatever the sort of the pent-up demand people say we're doing something the report gets done the media pick up on it and nothing happens so and then new report gets done and nothing happens yeah and it's and and the political class exercise through these reports one after another what is really interesting is you know Simon Harris's savings scheme, right? Like, I thought that it had been implemented given the media attention that it had gotten. But that was just the announcement of something that they were going to do.

31:52And so this is a really good example of where you will see in Ireland, the big flashy announcement of we're going to have a savings scheme, which, by the way, oh my god, how the hell do we not already have this? That is another question for another day. But okay, so Simon announces the big saving scheme, but talks about it endlessly. And it's about something that doesn't yet exist. And then there's reports, you know, six months later of, well, it might not actually be the thing that it was originally going to be because it's harder to do that. We're going to water it down a little bit. And if you just talk about something for long enough, politically, you get the credit for the thing that never happened because people forget that it never happened.

32:33And there's a graveyard of these flashy brochures that went and died, but that people collected votes on, because this is all we do. We make a splash, we talk about it, all these great things we're going to do. And then they quietly disappear when an NGO takes over, or it's kind of some third party and some consultant is going to do it, and then it goes away. So everything is outsourced, is what you're saying. So basically, the idea is make the problem go away, outsourced to someone to say such and such, you know, Ernst & Young is looking after this, or one of the big four is looking after this, and then we move on.

33:08I want to end by you've called the economy a conduit economy. I think that's a very interesting observation. Explain that to the listeners. Yeah, again, it's a simple one. You know, Ireland's economy is predicated on the idea overwhelmingly that money passes through us, that we are a kind of, you know, collect$200 as you pass go, that we never built this indigenous economy. You know, and in fact, not only did we not build it, but we squandered decades where we had this great tax income that we could have built something that was enduring and we didn't. Because what we're really good at doing at the economic level is having this kind of pass through economy where money and legal services and accounting services pass through, but nothing real actually materializes.

33:58from that. And if your job as the government is to make sure that that's what you're doing, you will start to do the same thing too. By which I mean that the government class become a conduit government, that ideas pass through without being transformed into anything real, that all we do is talk about spending and finance, because the only thing that we care about is the accounting, whether it's taxes of the economy that's happening, or the accounting of the systems that don't get built. And there's no one whose job it is to say, hang on a second, forget about the money that we spent. We have loads of money, right?

34:35So park that conversation for 10 minutes and let's talk about the thing that never happened. And so when our job as the government is to take care of an economy that isn't predicated on anything real, guess what you're going to have? A bunch of people that do not create policies that create anything real. Do you know that the very first plan for Dublin Metro was in 1915? I literally had this conversation with a stranger about two weeks ago. And the more I hear about this, the sadder it makes me. A hundred years ago, we had more trains in Ireland than we do today. Many more trains. Yeah. Many, many more trains.

35:11And the first plan for Dublin Metro was announced in 1915. So how do you think we're doing, delivery-wise? Well, 111 years later, and we don't yet have one metro. But we've got a map. We've got a lovely map. It starts in swords, I think. It goes all the way down. It's a lovely map. It ends bizarrely in Ranala. Why on earth does a metro end in Ranala? Another question. For the same reason that the Lewis didn't connect. Exactly, exactly. So let's just do, before you go, you've said that Ireland has no institutional memory. And I found this very interesting. So there's no know-how. There's no bank of know-how that is there to be drawn on when the state wants to build a metro, build a hospital, etc.

36:04And you've also said it's not that the people who are working in the system are lazy. You said they're exhausted by the system itself. Let's just, because again, I don't want this to be a public sector worker bashing exercise. We know loads of them. Most Irish families have got a few teachers there. You've got a few cops. You've got nurses. All of us are from this. It's not an us and them. And that's the one thing that the UK went down and the United States went down. You know, it's like private sector, good, public sector, bad. It's a blend. Every sophisticated society is a blend of public and private sector.

36:38Let's end on this idea that the people in there are exhausted. Explain that to me. Well, firstly, I work and have worked for most of my career in the public sector. I have been one of these people, right? I understand the public sector and I understand the dedication and commitment that people make in joining the public sector. And there are many people recently who've reached out to me saying, what do I do? I said, join the public sector, make it, you know, contribute and make it good. I believe in strong institutions whose foundation are strong people. The issue in Ireland, people always go back to, you know, we're not talented or we're not good enough or we're the wrong people or we're lazy.

37:18This is just fundamentally not true. And in the piece, I outline a very simple A-B test that shows even with the smartest, bravest, best intentioned people, the system is designed in a way that it takes them and grinds them and their ambitions and their ideas and what they want to do and how they want to improve the world. they reduce it to nothing and they leave not only the system worse and not only taxpayers and the people who don't get the infrastructure worse off but the people who are trying to do this all day every day and why is that because guess what when you have no institutional memory by which i mean but you can't see any of what you're trying to transform and when we have no policies in ireland We have no policies for anything.

38:08So every time you come across a problem, and especially because we have people that move departments so rapidly and so often, it's a brand new problem. But guess what? 95 % of the problems that exist in government happen over and over and over again. But in Ireland, people are exhausted because every day they wake up and it's Groundhog Day. What problem am I solving today? Oh, I've never seen this problem before because the people that might have solved it six years ago have gone. Or that we don't have a policy to know what to do in exactly this situation. And so everything starts from scratch.

38:43So what you're saying that the system is, I'll just give you an example. Somebody listened to the podcast that we did a couple of weeks ago, Sinead, and she said that really chimed me because I recently left the public sector because I asked for something. They couldn't deliver it because it wasn't in the rules. And then they realized when I left that the job I was doing had to be done. So they've now outsourced the job to me at twice the wage. Yeah. So she just said, like, they could have so easily have fixed it inside. But then I had to leave. And then they realized I was indispensable. And now I'm employed back as a consultant on twice the wage, but with no real link to the actual outcome.

39:32That's a great example. That's a great example of the people being destroyed by the system. Yes, and I want to focus on one thing. Most people listening to this are going to think about the money, which we've talked about before, and this is a real issue. That task has been outsourced, so now taxpayers are paying double for it. But let me refocus this slightly, because I actually recently wrote a paper on this following Doge in the US. the important thing here is that this lady said yes I will do this but imagine if she had said no this leaves us in a much more precarious situation because the one person who could do the job and knew that the job had to get done could just have walked away and that you know is actually a much worse situation than paying twice as much because you're losing more institutional memories so the next person that starts has to really start from scratch.

40:25So forget about costs for a minute. I want to focus on the fact that this is about more than just money and money is important. But like this woman that said yes, thank God she said yes. She could have said no. And that, you know, she's doing Ireland a service, earning twice as much, sure. But like she could have walked away. And this is the issue. Just finally, is there a country in your experience that is getting things right, number one, or getting things, to use a Bertie expression, righter than us. So, like, I'm a real policy nerd, right? Like, I love looking at what other countries are doing across the spectrum.

41:05And I talk to people in other countries. And, you know, I think when we were texting last week, I was in Lithuania. I'm really lucky in that I get to see in the inside of so many different places and how they're doing so many different things. Everyone kind of says to me, but you know, Ireland's not the worst, like other places are struggling. We're not the worst, right? We are absolutely not the worst. Different countries struggle with different things for different reasons. But I will say Ireland across the board is struggling nearly universally with everything because of the issues that we've discussed today.

41:41And we have the right and we should ask more from the government in terms of delivery. So saying that other countries are also struggling quantitatively and qualitatively, Ireland is nearly worse on all of them, but we should also recognize other places are doing badly whilst saying to our government, hang on a second, like there is no accountability here built into the structure. So what we can do is actually be public about that accountability. Well, we're doing, let's say that, I think it'd be far too vainglorious to be saying we're doing a public service here, John, on this podcast. But I think it is a aspect of living in Ireland, which most of us find lamentably frustrating on a constant basis.

42:27And any of us who are involved in any sort of little initiatives, whatever we're doing in our life, in our private lives, in our professional lives, sometimes look aghast at the lack of accountability and say, how in God's name do you expect this thing to work if you don't have a system of checks and balances and accountability and rewards and failures and punishment and all this and we're left with a situation where the first plan for Dublin Metro was in 1915 and it still hasn't been built which is kind of shocking Sinead yeah I mean these are I mean if you don't laugh you cry so let's I don't know let's not try look like an Argentinian football coach if we cried we can't be having that all right Sinead as always it has been an absolute pleasure I know this will cause all sorts of conversations up and down the country from listeners who are listening to this.

43:18And you are doing a sterling job. And just so you know, if you want to find Sinead, A, she's in the Irish Times, and B, her own Substack, which is a much more heavily edited version of a longer form of her articles, is this time it's different. So just Google it. Sinead, an absolute pleasure. Talk to you very soon. Thanks. See you, David. Bye, John.

44:11We'll be right back. July ends July 27th. Shop today at Wayfair.com. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. This message is brought to you by Cologuard. If you recorded songs off the radio for a mixtape, it might be time to screen for colon cancer.

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45:19I love having Sinead on because she lays it out just so clearly, but it's very depressing at the same time. And like you, as you said at the start, you know, who's tearing the hair out? I am. I am. Big time. Tearing my hair out. Yours frustrated from Stilorgan. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I'm not just going to take no for an answer. I'm not having it. But what I did find kind of funny is some of the examples that she quoted at the very beginning there, they all seem to be or a lot of them seem to be kind of tech and IT related which is kind of ironic given the fact that we are a tech and IT hub for the world for Europe and the world.

46:06I know I know I think in actual fact that's what we'll kind of conclude John I think that if you look at the difference in delivery between for example the multinational companies who are staffed by Irish people, run by Irish people, built by Irish people, the fabs are built by Irish people, they are operating at the highest level of efficiency that any companies in the world can achieve. And you contrast that with the parallel economy, which is also staffed by Irish people, run by Irish people, answering to Irish people, called the public service. It is not the people that are the problem. It is the system that if we can host the world's most efficient technology companies and healthcare companies here with Irish brains and Irish expertise, how can we not do the same in the public service?

47:04The problem is the system. Let us leave it there. We will talk to you on Tuesday.

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