The €133 Billion Black Hole: Why Ireland Can’t Track Its Spending

0:00If your blood was boiled by last podcast, Sinead O'Sullivan highlighting where the Irish state is going wrong, it will be dialed up even yet more today because we're talking to Matt Fenlon, a young theoretical physicist who has, with his friends, other mathematicians, looked at how Ireland spends its money and the upshot is not very, neither helpful, appealing or reassuring. How Ireland Wastes Money. That's all coming up on The Pod.

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1:44To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? Are you frustrated? Were you angry? Were you, let's just say, tearing your hair out as John was literally at the end of the last podcast with Sinead O'Sullivan about the inefficiencies, about the lack of data, about the lack of targeting, about the lack of overall plans in the Irish government setup. And again, this is something that people discuss in Ireland, whether you're in a pub, whether you're going for a stroll, whether you're at the kitchen table. The big question is, where is all the money going?

2:30Where is it going? Who's getting it? Do we know who's getting it? And that expression, value for money, is rolled out again and again. But what actually does that even mean, value for money? All we know is that the Irish state's budget has risen exponentially, particularly current expenditure. So the expenditure of running the place day to day has increased dramatically over the last 10 years. Now, in fairness, the economy has expanded. The population has expanded. There's all new issues that need to be dealt with. It's not as if we're actually dealing with something that is standing still and we're just throwing money on it.

3:07I've always said, and anyone who listens to the podcast knows that I think the economy is alive, vulnerable, fragile, fantastic, interrelated ecosystem that is never inert. It is never asleep. It is always moving. It is always awake. It is always shifting, shaping, and shifting again. So, not surprising, money will be spent. But the question is, where is all it going? Which is the Sinead O'Sullivan key question. Now, luckily, we have a young man on the podcast today. Matt Feldman is a theoretical physicist. He is part of a group, which I'm going to talk about in a second, called the Problem Solving Association.

3:47He is applying his own mathematical and data savvy brain to try to understand where all the money is going. Do we have any basis for even knowing who the contractors are who are getting government money, what they're delivering, how much they're paid, and does one part of the government speak to another so that we can pinpoint in one piece of data where the money is, who's spending it, etc. etc. Matt Fennon, you are very welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me on, David. Not at all. Tell me, Matt, let's identify the problem, which is government spending. Let us identify what is going on inside the machine.

4:32Let us see if anybody knows it or anybody has any sense of where the money is going. And finally, then let's look at what as a potential solution. So let's start. You did the Leaving Cert when you're a young man. Yeah, so I would have finished my Leaving Cert in 2017 back when, you know, I think the overall state budget, we would have spent around 68, 69 billion euro. And now it's today, 2026, planned expenditure is like 133 billion euro, which is nearly a doubling. So it's doubled to spend it. Okay. Yeah, so the state's gotten quite big, you know. So like in that time period, I've left college, worked a few jobs and started to think myself about, you know what are the things that I'm interested in so my background I would have studied theoretical physics in college and an awful lot of people in my course and in kind of the subject that I study they're either working in finance or they're in academia and one of the things that kind of drove me to do the work that I'm going to talk to you about now is um I kind of sat down one day and I realized yes I could go work for a bank I could go work for a trading firm but fundamentally like the things that I want in my day-to-day life such I want I want to be able to send my kids to to nice schools I want to be able to have nice public spaces I might want a psychopath or I might want a metro I might want an extra Lewis right and I was like or maybe a house to live in yeah no a house as well right so but then I kind of realized like no matter how independently wealthy I might get I don't think currently well the way I'm viewing it that that's the way that these things can happen I think I think the state can be a really powerful tool to do some really important things.

6:02And I kind of am taking the bet, like, even if there's in one year of my life, I'm able to help contribute in a positive way to public spending, even by 1%, that potentially, that's a billion euro worth of potential impact. And then I'm happy. That's my contribution to society done. And even if I get a tenth of a percent, like, look, I'd take that, you know. So that's kind of where I kind of started then to move and kind of focus on these kind of more societal kind of problems. Well, I mean, I find it fascinating that you and some of your friends are using your evident brain power, your data savvy, your mathematical tools that are available to you from your learning to actually look at how this country is governed.

6:41When you decided to look under the hood at public expenditure, public procurement, explain to me and the listeners what you found, how shocked you were and where it led you. Yeah, so it started, so value for money, as you kind of hit on, is this term that we all hear, but I don't think there's a common understanding. So one of the things, part of my training is kind of breaking things down to kind of a simple abstraction that we can all kind of understand and have a conversation about. So I just was like, well, there's these big public spending codes. There's all these regulations and rules that the state has to follow.

7:12So it's like, well, let's just break it down to the transaction. Let's actually just go, well, where's this money going? Because as I've hit on earlier, and you've mentioned, the state's gotten so big, we're spending all this money. So the state spends money on like social protection, spends it on wages, spends it on all these types of things, grant aides, which can be a bit complicated to kind of have a clear conversation of, was this value for money to hire extra teachers or hire extra staff or hire more civil servants or hire an extra engineer? So let's just break it down to a type of spending, which is procurement, where there's a very clear need and there's also kind of going to be a contract.

7:44So what we basically found, right, is so we hear people talk about the children's hospital, the bike shed, the Arts Council IT project. All of those are things that the state has gone and procured, right? So we were just like, well, there should just be a list of all the things, right? There should be a project. There should be a contract. There should be the request. So why isn't there just one central list of all projects of a certain size in the state that we can just go look at and go, did we buy things at the price we expected to pay? Did we actually get what we wanted in the end? You know, did they finish our time?

8:15And it turns out that, in fact, this doesn't exist. And the system isn't designed. No, it doesn't exist. Wait, wait, wait, before you go. So we have two things going on here. One is that the state has expanded so dramatically that it has to look outside for expertise that it just simply doesn't have in the core civil service. So when you're building a hospital, for example, you need to outsource that building to builders who can build a hospital, right? Yes. Because you don't have a state hospital building unit. And kind of thankfully you don't. Because I think that in a way, if you're employing the best builders, they will deploy the best technology.

8:53They will have the best expertise. They will have the best practitioners. And hopefully that decision to outsource to a contractor will save you money and will lead to the best outcome. Let's look at the process or the moment where the state decides to build a hospital. What then happens? So what happens then is there would have been an awful lot of paperwork. Like people would have sat down around the table and go, look, we have a need. There's some demand for something. And we've now decided this is the thing we want. What happens is they enter a procurement process. They will have a tender, which basically outlines the market, what they're basically looking for and what they require.

9:33And if there's any kind of procurement experts listening, there's lots of different ways that the state can engage the market, but we don't really need to get into that. But what happens afterwards is someone eventually, the state goes, well, this person can then do it. So they would have had some criteria deciding who's the best person to do it. And they award that contract. So suddenly now it's like, well, we're going to build a hospital. This person is now going to do it. And the rules that we have both in Ireland and the EU that focus on procurement really only go up to that point. It's about did we give it to the right person?

10:00So was it given out fairly? And did we communicate to people that we've actually then done this thing? So because I'm older than you, I probably appreciate that this particular moment was the moment of corruption in the old world, right? So in the old world, there would be a fellow who knew a fellow who was a friend of a politician who bunged another politician and they got the contract. So that was the corruption of the 1970s and 80s. So in a way, the state is obsessed by fighting the last battle, which is the corruption battle. So if the procedure of giving the contract is seen to be clean and fair and uncorrupt, what you're saying is that is where the state ends.

10:42it doesn't follow the money in any effect after that exactly so let's talk about a specific contract so say for example we've got metrolink that's going to be run by a state agency that's i think it's actually closing this week they award that to someone they themselves then are the ones that manage that contract no one in central government will have then okay we've got three metrolink projects that have just been awarded to these three different companies they won't have a live update feed of how much money is being spent on that performance because the responsibility is with the contracting authority, not with the department that's responsible for that type of spending.

11:15So that could be the Department of Public Expenditure, it could be the Department of Transport. So cabinet don't have access to that centralized view of like, these are all these big projects that must be spent. So it is this, yeah, as you said, the last four, it's this hyper focus on awarding stuff. But we'll get onto the podcast later on that actually the rules that we've written around that have actually given, have not achieved the outcomes that we want to achieve, which is about more competitiveness. And we'll get onto that. But yeah, so it just stops. So suddenly I'm now working on a project.

11:41I've given the award to company A. The mechanisms in place to then monitor and maintain that project and sit on it and get the value there aren't really there. You know, like across most state entities, we don't have the skill sets that might exist in the private sector to sit on that. So a very simple question, right? And this might kind of elucidate it more for people is I would have working with one of the members of the team, we would have asked all the departments in the state and a number of agencies if they could provide a list of contracts that are currently on, over, under budget. And a lot of them couldn't provide that.

12:12Wow. So I think what this becomes is we're transparent about what we're going to do and who's going to do it. But I don't think the state actually has sufficient management level information to then manage those in a way to actually get the value for it in the way that, say, the public might perceive what value is. But Mark, can I ask you, why not? I would have thought that one of the basic jobs of managing money is knowing how much you're managing, who is getting it, what you're getting it for, and be able to cross-reference that with the competition, with what was said was going to happen, what actually did happen with the outcomes.

12:49Are you saying that we're dealing with a black hole in effect? Yes. Now, depending on the entity, so the agency or department that is the contracting authority for that, they might have fantastic data, but it's not a shared standard. There's some people that didn't even have a purchase order system, for example. There's actually some departments right now that don't actually have a purchase order. And if you're someone who's working as an accountant or an account paid well somewhere, you're going, how on earth can you authorize and manage expenditure without having something like a purchase order in place?

13:16But yeah, so actually, I'm going to hit on this point, David, and I haven't got to it yet, is we actually don't have a number for how much you spend on procurement each year. And this is part of this bigger problem. So procurement is, as just going back to it, it's like you're getting someone else to do something. So everyone here has a bank account, right? Everyone here goes, look at their statement at some point. And I'm just going to talk about my shopping, for example. So I see on my bank account, on my Tesco shop that I do every Friday. So there's an amount there. So I would go, well, if I want to know how much I spend on Tesco per year, I should just be able to add up how much I spent on Tesco.

13:46And then if I go, well, how much does my household spend on Tesco? I should just be able to go all the different bank accounts and go add those up and go, well, in this year, Matthew and his household spend this much on Tesco. The state, how they estimate procurement is based on something called the contract award notice value, writing the estimate on that. So back to the process of we've asked something via tender and we've awarded via contract award notice. The contract award notice isn't actually spending. And that's the number that the state and also the EU use in most cases to estimate how much we spend on procurement.

14:14So it's an estimate. Yes. And it's also sometimes as well, like you might award a project for like a billion euro in 20 to 27. And they, from my understanding, for the methodology they provided in response to questions, is they just sum that up. And what kind of gets worse though is there's a legal obligation on people to publish these contract award notices but there's no consequence for not publishing them so the person who made the policy telling all the entities of the state to do this thing no one evaluates that right and like there's no one's one job to go and make sure these people are compliant it's assumed or that responsibility lies with the individual contracting authority usually with the accounting officer and so the department that's in charge of all these policies and stuff is using a figure that they know that there's issues with the data, but they don't actually go and check or maybe force people to publish it better, you know?

15:05So wait a sec, there is, again, I know that this podcast deals with also, we're getting, this is the podcast for accountants and bean counters, this particular podcast. But there is a department called the Department for Public Expenditure. Now, I would have thought that in a non-Orwellian world where black means white and good means bad and that the Department of Public Expenditure's job is to hold the purse strings on all the public expenditure as written on the tin. Am I wrong? So they do, but not in the, like, see, deeper is a, it's quite a, not a controversial topic, I'd say, but you might be talking to some people that might think they should do their job differently.

15:51But how they do it, and my understanding of how they do it is, is kind of through these kind of business cases or evaluation before you spend. But I would argue there should be afterwards. And actually, quite interestingly, there's something called the OGP, Office of Government Procurement, which is now part of Deeper. They actually used to kind of... I love the deeper OGPT. This is, again, I come back to 1984. The reason is that I've actually picked up a copy of 1984 and began to read it again over the summer, bits and pieces, because it's just so good. And of course, one of its premises is that the language is so mangled that people eventually can't understand truth from fiction, etc.

16:28So deeper is the department for public expenditure and reform. And they also have like digitization and a number of other things. Like there's some very, very capable people in those organizations doing like their work incredibly hard. Like there's, there's people in there that probably don't sleep. But the issue with those organizations is they don't really have the culture of telling people what they do as well that aren't in the system. But I'll go back to the point that I wanted to make of, they did actually kind of do what we talking about there, like look at the actual spending of money.

16:56So they used to do these fantastic reports that I encourage anyone to go look up online. It's like the tender and payment analysis reports, where for 2013 up to 2019, they would have basically taken a sample of the largest public bodies that spend on procurement and asked them to give them their expenditure level data. I think it was nearly invoice level. And they used to use fantastic reports going, well, the state actually spends most of its money on SMEs. These are the things we're spending money on and understanding the suppliers we engage with. So they would have released a 2019 report in 2022.

17:25But since then, they've been no longer to do this analysis and produce these reports, because they don't have a legal basis, actually, to get this information. And to me, that is kind of worrying, you know? Should not the legal basis be, taxpayers pay money for a service. We are not mandated about how much tax we pay. It comes out as P-A-Y-E. So it disappears. It disappears into a system. That system then spends the money. The money is and should be minded by somebody. The legal basis is the social contract between the citizen and the government, I would have thought. Yeah. And I just like revenue are very good at collecting money off people.

18:05Like if you ever talk to people in revenue, like they have fantastic technical capabilities to know what they think you owe and actually how they collect it. right so i would have thought like the absolute precision that they're able to take money from us from businesses and get it into the system i think it's a fair assumption that like why would you not have the same level of focus and precision when you're when you're then using it can i just ask you just like again as a citizen as somebody who's applying yourself to look at this debacle why do you think there is such a culture because the way i see it and many people the podcast will It's only when the media hound a certain project, like the Children's Hospital, or like the Arts Council, or like whatever, that eventually and begrudgingly, someone rocks up in front of the Public Accounts Committee and begins to ventilate and to make public these basic issues.

19:01that seems to be a culture of denial, of secrecy. Or sometimes just not knowing, right? So you talk about the Arts Council and you talk about the Children's Hospital. Basically, there's an obligation on state entities. So how we did this analysis was there's an obligation on state entities to produce reports of payments or purchase orders in excess of 20 ,000 euro, right? That was an obligation that was as a result of a Program for Government commitment to 2011 and then there's a public reform kind of plan in 2012 and then some rules that came in 2016. But there is an obligation of people to produce this.

19:30no one ever looked for the children hospital to publish this data until 2025 so we had all these committees all these things but yet people weren't going well let's just look at the transactions i think it's also how we how we talk about it like maybe there's a skill set of people who are question system as well like or maybe people just assume that the transactions were there and people were looking at it you know that's what i think it's maybe also so i would look i wouldn't say it's not i just don't think that it's how we talk about it and the system talks about spending is the same. And that's where the issue is.

19:58And that's maybe where the perception sometimes is. Now, yes, look, people do deliberately obfuscate information and they do dodge, dip and dive. But like the children's hospitals still have not published all their purchase order data since they've started the project, which they would have had the obligation to do so. And what's troubling to me, though, about that is I would think from one of the biggest and most scandalous projects in the state's history, they should just have a file where they could have gone once we asked for it, here's everything. But they'd released it in a staggered, like they're still releasing stuff.

20:24They only released Q4 2025, like a few weeks ago. Like, why don't we have Q2 2026 spending on the children's hospital available to the public so they can see what's happening and going on and judge the activity? That's pretty, I mean, it's kind of, again, what I want to come back to is this, how do you run a country if you don't know what you're running? Yeah, like, the fear that I have is, because we have Andy Byrne over in the UK as a new Prime minister. And we've had lots of prime ministers there. And we now have in this position, we're rotating Taoiseach here. And we have this idea of like leaders and individuals.

20:56My fear is that, like, I would hope that we're on a ship, right? We're all on the same ship. And there's a captain's bridge. We've got our head of state. We've got our senior civil servants. We've got our ministers. And that there's levers and there's dials in there that they can interact with to make changes to our course of our ship. My fear is that those buttons either don't work, people don't know the buttons are even there. And maybe it's a rudderless ship. And that's what I'm afraid of, you know, because it is this massive complex thing. And I think it's also one of the things like, because I've had an awful lot of engagement, kind of like kind of more senior civil servants, like what they have to worry about is completely different to they say if I was running my own business.

21:37So I'll go back to the example of the purchase order data and say, for example, the fact that we don't have a register of all the contracts in the state. So someone came up with this policy, right, that people had to publish this data. It was no one's job afterwards to go check it. So for example, people can go find online that there was a circular issued by the Department of Housing to remind people, in this case, local authorities, that they now had to basically do this thing of publish purchase orders and says 20 ,000 euro, right? But the Department of Housing had never at any point checked the compliance because they viewed it wasn't their job.

22:06Their job was just to remind people of this obligation. So if you scale that up, and we've seen how big the state has gotten, I don't think there's anyone necessarily in the system that has a very, like knowing how something that's spending about 70 billion euro a year, even look at adjusting for inflation stuff back then, like managing that expenditure is very different to something that's nearly spending up to 140 billion a year with all these now competing demands. We've got to build houses. You've got to build infrastructure. You've got to manage the trade deals and uncertainty that come from what's going on in the United States and happening globally.

22:34Like all these different things are coming at you. You're not just operating through the simple lens of my P &L. There's all these other things that you have to account for. And then also there's these political, I think maybe this is also one of the issues as well. It's like there's political decisions that come into this. It's not just a purely rational idea of what value is. And I think this is one of the reasons why I think there should be kind of a very simple register of all our spending and all the contracts, because value is subjective. So if we go back to the Tesco analogy, right, my shopping list is going to be different to you, David, and it's also going to be different to the Irish rugby team or the women's football team, right?

23:08What we buy, like what we look for is going to be different and what they think is good value for money and I think is good for value for money. I might think getting a bunch of vegan magnums for like four quid is fantastic, you know, whereas if you're an athlete, it's like, hold on a second, this isn't going to work out too well if I got a match on the weekend, you know? Yeah, I'm with you completely, but I want to get to this. You've looked at this, you've looked under the hood, what you found is that there is no consistent data that benchmarks where the money is going. Just to remind the listeners, we're talking about big capital projects, the lion's lion's share of government spending is current expenditure, which is even more slippery because it's even less likely to have an end outcome.

23:51So at least in the context of the Children's Hospital, there is a thing that will be finished at some stage, right? And that project will therefore come to a close. Current expenditure is a totally different creature because it is open-ended. How do you, when you've looked at current expenditure, what are you seeing? Yeah, what I've seen is, so look, one of my parents is an accountant and I think a lot of people would be familiar with the big four and what they do. And I found it very odd when I started seeing on one of their websites in college that they were talking about working with the public, working with the state.

24:25My understanding of what the big four was is that they provided audit services and like advisory to large multinationals in Ireland, for example. And so I was like, oh, that's a bit interesting. So during this project, it turned out, right, that like the big four, like Ernest & Young, PLBC, KPMG, and Deloitte, right? And we hear these conversations about like, there would have been, so Jack Chambers would have basically made the decision recently for like insourcing in something called the NTMA, right? Because they would have been of the belief that the state is spending too much on certain consultancy and it might be a good idea to, you know, insource this and it would reduce cost.

24:57But I don't think until our work, like anyone actually knew how much was being spent. So like in our data set, which we'll talk at the end about, there's about 1.13 billion euro across 8 ,649 records. So that's like rows in the spreadsheet, right? Across 142 state bodies where the big four has been paid. And if you look at 2025 data, it's now broken 200 million euro a year. It would have been like sub 100 million, sub actually 90 million in 2020. So we're seeing this massive growth. And the issue here is actually the growth could be because maybe people are reporting data better. or is it actually the state has now massively increased its dependency and use of consultants?

25:33What are the state, let's say the Department of Education, right, which engages one of these big companies, for what? Yes. What are they doing? So when we looked at the data, right, so we're just going to look at Ernest & Young, for example. They've been paid by the Department of Education, basically nearly 35 million euro. So from 2019 onwards, they're basically getting paid like seven to eight million euro a year. What are they doing? It just says contract services, contractor, contracting services, ICT services and contract services. And the issue, right, is so we're pulling this data from something from these purchase order payment reports.

26:09The issue is I actually can't link that back reliably to the contract award notices or the tenders that led to them getting paid because the Department of Education can't just decide to pay EY money. They have to follow this procurement process, right? But all it says, if you go look at our database, we go up to their website and I encourage everyone to just, or even ask ChatGPT, you know, go find the Department of Education's purchase order reports in excess of 20 ,000 euro. All you'll see is contracting services. And in that information, like I can't evaluate if we got value for money. It might be that EY are providing great value to the state.

26:40You know, they're doing a great job, but we can't tell. Wait a second. Look, let's just think of what the Department of Education does. You teach kids, they're not doing that. You build schools, they're not doing that. You maintain schools, they're not doing that. What are they doing? Like from my reading of the contract award notices, but I'm not comfortable to like link them together yet because it's... No, but I'm just asking on behalf of the average dude, I'm asking. I think they're helping with accounting services for schools. That's what I think is going on. That's what I think the payments are for.

27:13But we don't know. And that's the key. Exactly. It's not clear. Like without further questioning, we don't know the answer. And I think that's the issue. Finally, Matt, you have come up with a solution. let us talk about your solution which i find fascinating yeah so the solution is basically that there should be something called a golden thread right where there's a there's a clear link all the way from so you go payment to invoice to purchase order to contract to contract award to tender so basically it goes if there's a payment in your bank account right there should have been a reason for that so if you're a business you don't pay someone without an invoice and then if you get an invoice you don't just pay the invoice without another reason which could be a purchase order.

27:51And then you don't raise a purchase order unless you follow, like you don't just go hire a plumber or an IT person for no reason. You would have probably done some sort of evaluation. You then would have signed a contract with them. So there should just be a link with all that context that goes back to the payments so we can understand it. And so in part of that solution, what we basically did is we went to all of these state entities. A lot of them weren't publishing, like a significant amount of them. And we just got them to publish. And we decided to aggregate all this information to a single dashboard that you can now review and look at.

28:19So there's about 100 billion now worth of public spending across 216 entities. Now we have like splits. So the NTMA has like six different sub reports. So we've treated them to kind of like sub entities. But now you can see where that money is going. And I think for the first time you can click on a supplier. So there's a company called Micromail, for example, which I don't think many people know about. I think they basically provide software to the state. They've been paid like 350 million quid. Now, I don't think it's directly on time. I think it's cost. That's a hell of a lot. That's a lot of money.

28:48Yeah. But I think it's money's going through them to purchase licenses for stuff. But it's 117 different entities. So it's 117 different basically PDFs, if you think about this, right, have these people in a row saying that they've provided something. And in 2025, at a minimum, 63 million euro has been paid to them. Now, they might not be netting that. That could be 63 million euro worth of stuff. No, it could be a holding company for other things. Yeah, but it's going to them and we don't know what's coming at the far side. Yeah. And so the solution is they've got this dashboard, but the next solution is bringing this golden thread.

29:20And the thing, David, is that this is actually an EU-wide problem. So the EU spends about 2.5 trillion euros a year on procurement. They have the same issues that we have there in terms of linking it back. And I think from an economist point of view, and like, so you've got like, why is Walmart really good at buying stuff? You know, they have a really good relationship with their suppliers. Now, different rules, obviously. But I think the state could buy a lot better. I think the state could have better conversations around, well, well, we've paid EY this much money for things. Like, would insourcing be a good idea?

29:46Would there be value there? You mentioned the Walmart example is because Walmart know who their suppliers are and how much they're spending, they can get better value for money for their customers. So the state is the dominant buyer of everything in Ireland. Let's not forget that. And the dominant buyer has, in any market economy, a dominant position. So it can extract value, can get better value. it knows what's going on. I mean, the upside to knowing what you're spending is enormous socially, politically, commercially, etc. And you're delivering the better value for money at the end of the day.

30:26You know, projects work, what projects don't work. You know what suppliers work, which suppliers don't work. You know who's taking the piss, who's not taking the piss. I mean, these are basic things. But just one of the issues, though, is that, and I think if you talk to heads of procurement across the state, is that like, EU law basically means past performance cannot be used to judge how you reward something. So that is kind of a potential problem. Why? I mean, past performance is all you fucking have. Sorry, I'm getting quite frustrated here. No, like my response is, I think you'd need to talk to someone who's in expert procurement law.

31:00I think it's basically to do with like how the state engages things has to be done differently to how a private company does it. There's just like, it's for example, like when the state, I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong. and if someone's listening, they can correct me. But like, for example, sometimes when the state is selling houses we built, like we hire a sales agent and we pay them fees because it's, you know, maybe there's something that could go wrong if the state was directly dealing with people for transactions. Let me just come back to, we opened this discussion. You were saying, look, you're a young man, really well-educated.

31:30You could be doing all sorts of things, but you're deciding to focus your brain, your time on this idea of making Ireland work better. Are you confident, given what you know now, that in three years' time, I'm not going to say five, because when you're young, every year is significant and matters, in three years' time, that your objective of living in a better place, with better public parks, better Lewises, better housing, etc., that that objective will be closer to, not completion, but closer to moving in the right direction given what you know now about how the irish state works i think i have to hope that it's going to be better would be my response and i think yes it was kind of shocking to find out a lot of this this information but i think that what i realized was that it once you engage with people and you talk to them about it the system was able to move i think the problem is as you talked about with sinead on the last podcast was it's not the people it's the system and i think we've got good hardware and I'm going to talk like are the people in a lot of these places they work very hard very competent but it's the software and the rules that are bad and look I just have to hope David it's gonna be better because we have the national development plan that's now kicking into full gear we're going to be spending 270 billion plus euro most of which through procurement on really important projects that are necessary for Iran to grow and be this be be a fantastic country and I think there's some people in the system that are really fighting hard to make sure that the system can be there.

33:00Like if those people are able to work for the next three years and be supported to do what they want to do, I think, yes, we'll be in that position. But the pessimist in me says, no, it's probably going to get worse. I know you're a betting man. What are your odds? Oh, God. Jeez, I wouldn't offer any, like if there was a polymarket market that I wouldn't be offering cross prices more than like a 30 % chance, you know? Oh my God. Oh my God. You see when it comes down to the number. Listen, Matt, that was fascinating. Where can listeners find you and your work? Yes. So if you probably take a Google of there's a public payment and purchase order tracker, you should find it.

33:38Or if you go on to my LinkedIn or the TPSA, the Problem Solving Association, or you kind of like ask ChatGPT, you'll find also more members of the team that worked on it because it wasn't just the TPSA. So it should be quite easy to find. Or I'll send you on the link and it can be in the description for the episode. Perfect. We will do that. Matt Fenlon, thank you very much. fascinating stuff. And it's also very reassuring to hear from our lads like John and I that there is a generation coming up who can count number one, John, which was something that you and I were never that famed for, but also who have the altruistic interest in the state and the place we're living to actually make a difference.

34:13So Matt Fennon, thank you so much indeed for that. Brilliant. Thanks so much for having me on.

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36:14Mark, if my blood was boiling after Sinead it is totally evaporated at this stage and I can't quite figure out is this a kind of a cultural thing or a political mindset or you know that whole idea of, and it's quite an Irish thing of keeping your cards close to your chest. Whatever you say, say nothing, John. Whatever you say, say nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Look, I don't know, dear listener, if you could see the state of your mind now. Steam coming out of his ears. He's just, the fist is thumping, it's up. Oh, yeah. I've had enough. No, so look, what we're trying to do is examine the micro in the context of Sinead O'Sullivan's macro the other day.

37:05So Sinead O'Sullivan is saying, look, there is this major problem with delivery in Ireland. And so what Mass has added to that is one of the obvious problems with delivery is we have no metric for delivery because there is no way of measuring openly how much is being procured by every single department against a background of, A, the cost of running Ireland having doubled in the last seven years. That's the first thing. But B, and probably more worryingly, John, the National Development Plan out to 2040, which is slating tens of billions of euros in public procurement. Now, if there is a problem with public procurement, it has to be fixed before we go into this National Development Plan.

37:59So I think that it's definitely cultural. there definitely is a culture of secrecy there definitely is a culture of on a need-to-know basis there definitely therefore stemming from that is an unwillingness to be open with the public and there's also a sense and i think this is very crucial that the political class doesn't really care that the bureaucracy has become bigger than the political class that is supposed to actually run it it's actually when we hear people like like matthew and sinéad that that becomes more and more obvious but actually i suppose what they're saying in another or what matt was saying in a nutshell is we need more paperwork you know in many ways actually we need maybe less paperwork we need more data like we have so basically what we need is we need records But that's kind of what I mean.

38:59Yeah, they can be on Excel spreadsheets as long as those Excel spreadsheets are accurate and they link together. So the key is that the departments are so full of their own procurement ways and means that nothing is speaking to each other. So every department is in a silo. And as a silo, they can explain what they're doing. Yeah. But in the aggregate, they can't explain what we're doing on a general basis. And there isn't one figure. And to come back to Sinead's point, there isn't one person whose head will roll if this is not done or who will be promoted if it is done. So we're actually operating in a vacuum.

39:43And that is the profoundly dangerous position to be in because you're operating in a vacuum where the tax revenues coming in are buoyant because of the multinationals. So the money gets hosed into the vacuum, and in effect, it disappears. Because where it should be appearing is the value for money. It's the children's hospital built on time, or it's the bloody bike shed that costs a few grand, not a few hundred grand, or whatever it happens to be. Once you have no way of measuring, John, the old adage is you've no way of managing. So in effect, and I think we leave it here, our state, by not being rigorous in the measurement, has allowed itself to end up in a situation where we are not rigorous in the management.

40:33And the only people who can benefit from that, John, is the bureaucracy, that creature that has built up. And it is now so big that I think it's elbowed out the political class that are supposed to be the mechanism whereby the bureaucracy is answerable to the people at the elections every four years. But now the bureaucracy doesn't care because it's bigger and more powerful. And that, I think, is the lesson. And it's kind of terrifying because bureaucracies, once they become enormous, are very, very difficult to pare back into shape. And will only be pared back into shape in the context of a fiscal crisis where the money runs out.

41:20And that, I believe, is the problem, that you only get change when change is forced at the 11th hour. and the way that change would come in Ireland, John, would be a massive disappearance of American money. And if that's what to happen, you'd get reform. But absent that, you just get drift. And I think that's the way we are going. Well, we wouldn't have the money to reform at that stage because all the American money would be gone. But I just say one last thing, Mac, is that the problem-solving association should be the byline or the mission statement for every government department. That's very true.

41:59That's very, very true. John, you and I shall be founding members of the Problem Creating Association. I think we're doing pretty good on that anyway. I'll talk to you Tuesday ahead. Bye. Good luck.

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