May’s deal with the EU will go down in flames in the House of Commons on Tuesday. To say her situation is hopeless is an understatement.

More than 100 of her own Tory MPs have publicly committed to vote against her, as have the DUP. She could have hoped to get a few Labour Brexiteers to get her over the line if she was close, and her whips could have bullied, bribed and cajoled a few of her own waverers with knighthoods, plum jobs and threats to expose girlfriends, boyfriends and dodgy business deals.

John McGuinness is 61 years of age. He was first elected to the Dáil 20 years ago. He’s been a minister for state and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). He’s a strong media performer and he’s no fool.

John McGuinness TD

He was summonsed to a meeting by the now-disgraced then-garda commissioner Martin Callinan in the car park of Bewley’s Hotel in Dublin. The meeting took place in January 2014 and lasted about half an hour. It happened just before McGuinness was due to chair the PAC’s hearing of garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe’s evidence. ~ read more ~

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Before I recorded Episode 12 of the podcast, I sent a draft script of the section concerning Rosanna Davison to her PR representative, as a courtesy, and to allow her to comment. Her representative didn’t reply before my deadline, but later sent me an email, saying:

Rosanna Davison, as pictured on her website

You need to take a look at this line:

“The meaning of the words you used were clear, you said that gluten was responsible for arthritis, autism and schizophrenia”

Please take a closer look at the Irish Independent and you will see that Rosanna did not say this. The line in the article that caused the controversy was not a direct quote from Rosanna.

This is something which has gone to great lengths to explain at this stage if you read her statement more closely

She also makes clear that she would never advise anyone to use diet alone to treat any ailments.

~ read more ~

There is a sunny country to the east, where economic disaster looms, investors are likely to lose out, the stability of the government is under threat, and the financial shockwaves are likely to be felt throughout Europe, including in Ireland.

And we also have problems with Greece. ~ read more ~

During the week, a graphic put together by Ciarán Reilly was widely shared, which analysed the frequency of words used on the website of the right-wing lobby group, the Iona Institute.

The graph purported to show that, far from their claim of being concerned with everything that could negatively impact ‘the family’, the Iona Instutite have a rather narrower focus. The Iona Institute hit back with a chart of their own, which they claimed gave a more balanced impression of their interests.

So, it seems that The Iona Institute is most concerned with issues that affect traditional religious marriage? Not quite.

Google also allow you to search for pages that do not contain specific words. This is the search for Iona Institute pages that contain the word ‘marriage‘, which they claim shows that ‘traditional’ marriage is their primary concern. But this is the same search again, except excluding pages that mention ‘gay‘ and ‘same-sex‘.

It turns out that 60 per cent of the Iona pages containing the word marriage are in fact references to same-sex marriage – and that could well be an underestimate, because many of the pages are blog headline pages, some of which contain the word marriage, but the article they lead to discusses marriage equality.

So, when Iona talks about marriage, 60 per cent of the time they are talking about gay marriage.

Here’s How,  Ireland’s political, social and current affairs podcast is coming soon. It will be a call-in with a difference. You can leave your message by dialling 076 603 5060 on any political, social or current affairs issue that interests you.

Your message may be played and discussed in the podcast. You will be able to download and listen to the show, as soon as it is posted. See our page on how to call for tips on how to leave a good message.

Judge Martin Nolan

On Tuesday, Judge Martin Nolan released the convicted Anglo criminals Pat Whelan and William McAteer without them spending a day behind bars, saying that jailing them would have been ‘incredibly unjust’.

In the hullabaloo about Judge Nolan’s moral or legal justification, two clear errors of fact in his judgement remain unremarked.

The first is simple. He wrongly said that Whelan and McAteer did not commit their crimes for personal gain. Whelan and McAteer’s sole motivation was keeping the Anglo ponzi scheme that made them millionaires running a little longer, even their defence team wasn’t brazen enough to suggest otherwise. The illegal loan scheme had no function other than to prop up the Anglo share price, in which Whelan and McAteer had much of their fortunes invested.

Nolan’s second error was to say that ‘a State agency, the Financial Regulator, led them into error and illegality’. Nolan said this after watching Patrick Neary, the bumbling, incompetent Financial Regulator who resigned in disgrace after the affair, give evidence in his court. With Haugheyesque consistency, Neary told the court over and again how he simply couldn’t remember key meetings and events. His bad memory did Whelan and McAteer no harm at all.

But even if you didn’t see demeanour of the diffident, amnesiac Pat Neary compared to the wide-boy wheeler-and-dealers Whelan and McAteer, a quick glance of his history would tell you that Pat Neary never led anyone anywhere.

This claim by Judge Nolan has opened a discussion as to who was more to blame, Anglo or the Regulator. It is a false dichotomy, akin to arguing whether a murder victim was shot with a gun or a bullet. It implies that there was a regulatory tension between Neary and Anglo that just didn’t exist.

The Central Bank, Dawson Street, Dublin

The euro was established in 1999, stripping the Central Bank of half its functions – maintaining the currency. The mandarins wanted its other function, financial regulation, to be their responsibility – otherwise they risked having nothing to do. But they had allowed an illegal bank, Ansbacher/Guinness and Mahon, to operate a few metres from their office for decades, fully aware that its purpose was tax fraud. As early as 1976, the Central Bank was aware that “considerable measures were being taken by G&M to ensure certain schemes would not become known to the Revenue”

It was clear that the Central Bank lacked both the will and the capacity to regulate financial institutions. The public outrage would not allow such incompetence to be so publicly rewarded. But the Fianna Fáil/PD government were sure not to miss a chance to reward their supporters. They created a new, independent Financial Regulator, separate from the Central Bank, and then created third quango, the ‘Central Bank and Financial Services Authority of Ireland’, of which both were members.

Each of the three with boards, directors, lavish prestige offices, and enormous salaries. When he resigned in disgrace,  Neary got a lump sum of €630,000 on top of his €143,000 annual pension, with €13,178 thrown in to make up for holidays he didn’t take while snoozing at his desk.

The Financial Regulator listed its committees and departments as “The Authority, the Consumer Directorate, Prudential Directorate, Registry of Credit Unions Consumer Information Department, Consumer Protection Codes Department, Domestic Credit Institutions Department, Financial Institutions and Funds Authorisation Department, International Credit Institutions Department, Insurance Supervision Department, Investment Service Provider Supervision Department, Legal and Enforcement Department, Markets Supervision Department, Planning and Finance Department, Registry of Credit Unions, Executive Board, Consumer Committee, Prudential Supervision Committee, Audit and Risk Management Committee, Budget and Remuneration Committee, Consultative Consumer Panel, Consultative Industry Panel, and the Credit Union Advisory Committee.”

Perhaps wisely, the Central Bank did not give out such information.

For Neary, this was not a job, it was a reward. He was chosen because he was a staid, obedient career-long civil servant, not too bright, and not going to upset the government backers in the Galway Tent or their financiers. He was not chosen despite his modest talents, he was chosen because of them.

The sharp suits in Anglo knew that Neary was appointed out of contempt for regulation, and they held him in contempt accordingly. Whelan and McAteer’s colleagues, Peter Fitzgerald and John Bowe were recorded discussing their meeting with Neary, asking for billions to try to save Anglo:

Anglo Irish Bank Headquarters

John Bowe: (Laughing) That’s right. So under the terms that say repayment, we say: no.

Peter Fitzgerald: None…just none. Not applicable. Okay and what did he say? “I need a change of underwear?”

Bowe: (Laughing) There was a bit of that, there was a bit of that [discussing meeting with regulator].

…

Bowe: So anyway, that sort of got everybody’s attention and then we had Pat Neary. Pat Neary coming in and saying (mimicking), “C’mere lads, I just want to have a word with ya…yeah Jesus…so look c’mere, have you actually got assets, decent assets, that you can put in play? Is there stuff in there, like, that has value, you know?’

Fitzgerald: Yeah, yeah.

Bowe: “And look lads you know, if you’re going for this now make sure whatever you get sorts it out. Okay? You know?”

This is senior Anglo staff sniggering like schoolboys about how compliant Pat Neary was, how easily he was hoodwinked. And Judge Nolan has released their colleagues, Pat Whelan and William McAteer without spending a day in jail for their crimes because Neary led them, the poor innocents, into ‘error and illegality’.

More than 2,500 years ago the people of the town of Gortyn in central Crete made an innovation that changed the world. The Greek citizens inscribed all the laws of their city on a public wall for any literate person to read.

This was a revolutionary act.

The Law Code of Gortyn

Bullies, in the playground or in public life, thrive on ambiguity. Bullies cannot act alone. They rely on the silent assent of the crowd. Ambiguity allows them to bend rules one way and later another, as the situation suits them. In an oral tradition the bully can exploit this. When laws are carved in stone a victim can point at the exact article that the bully is violating, and undermine the bully’s popular support.

In May 2013, Alan Shatter told RTÉ’s Prime Time that Mick Wallace had been cautioned by a garda about using his mobile phone while driving. Shatter, it appears, got the information from then Garda Commissioner Callinan, who may have gleaned it from the garda computer system, Pulse.

Unsurprisingly, Mick Wallace made a complaint under the Data Protection Act that this was a misuse of data. Shatter and Callinan are named in the complaint; the penalties are serious, up to €100,000 in fines.

Minister Alan Shatter and former Commissioner Martin Callinan

Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes need fear no speeding tickets for the way he is dealing with the complaint. Eleven months after receiving it, the Bertie-era appointee was reported on Sunday as saying he will allow another month to see if Shatter and Wallace can settle the dispute ‘amicably’. Despite the simplicity of the case, Wallace has no chance of getting a ruling within a year of making the complaint.

Settling a dispute ‘amicably’ is a favourite of Irish authorities. It happens frequently in the courts, where huge pressure can be is put on parties to settle out of court; and it happens in all sorts of quasi-judicial situations such as the Data Protection Commission. It sounds good. Amicable. Friendly. Consensual. Progressive.

Billy Hawkes, Data Protection Commissioner appointed under Bertie Ahern

But it can also be a route to profound injustice. It is the job of the authorities to protect the weak from the strong. When authorities abrogate that duty, they leave the weak unprotected; we are left in a pre-Gortyn situation. The bullies can bend the law this way and that as suits their whim.

Martin Callinan described the use of Pulse data by garda whistleblowers to expose gross malpractice as ‘disgusting’. Exactly what disgusted him is unclear, as it seems he had no problem in tapping into the system to supply his mate Alan Shatter with tittle-tattle to smear Mick Wallace.

But Billy Hawkes wants this issue to be settled ‘amicably’, which means no formal decision, and no formal sanction against Shatter or Callinan. This is allowed for in law, but there is nothing in the Act that provides for cases to stretch over years to pressure someone to drop a formal complaint.

No doubt, part of this stems from pure laziness – it lightens his workload. Also, one tricky case off his books is one that is not going to be appealed, or draw criticism.

Mick Wallace TD

But pushing cases to be settled informally also means that those cases are more likely to be settled according to the power structures in society, not according to the law – it favours the strong over the weak.

This case is not a simple dispute between two people. It raises important issues about the separation of powers, accountability in politics and the public service, and the rights of citizens. It involves an allegation that two powerful individuals misused data to smear a political opponent. The suggestion is that an institution of state selectively leaks information to attack advocates of reforming that institution.

Mick Wallace has no right to authorise Billy Hawkes to wave aside these issues as though he were a rural sergeant waving on a local councillor driving home from the pub half-cut; and Billy Hawkes has no right to seek such authorisation from Mick Wallace.

We are so broke that special needs teachers are being cut, taxes are being raised and social welfare is being cut. But you – and all Irish taxpayers – are paying for magic. Abracadabra-alakazam there’s-nothing-up-my-sleeve style magic.

The conjuring trick in question is homeopathy. The VHI, the dominant insurer, has no truck with homeopathy, but newer insurers in the market use its touchy-feely image to recruit younger customers who are less likely to generate the expensive claims typical of the elderly.

Laya Healthcare (formerly Quinn) pay customers 75 per cent of the cost of visiting a homeopath (the same as they offer for GP visits). Aviva Health allows up to €200 a year to pay homeopaths; and HSF allows customers up to €1,300 per year for homeopathic ‘treatment’. The taxpayer is funding 20 per cent of all of these payments via the subsidy for health insurance payments.

The detachment of some homeopaths from reality is difficult to miss:

As a homeopath and astrologer, I have been fascinated by the homeopathic application of the planetary lights…  The remedy was made by exposing powdered milk sugar to a powerful telescope … focused on the planet Saturn… the physical symptoms that appeared and the content of the discussion during the proving suggest that this remedy might be effective for accident-related trauma, bone and nerve damage.

Patients, encouraged by the colour schemes and vocabulary used on homeopaths’ websites, may confuse homeopathy with ‘traditional’ or ‘natural’ medicine. In fact, Samuel Hahnemann, a physician from Saxony created homeopathy in 1796. He thought he felt a stomach upset come on after he tested a plant remedy supposed to settle the stomach. From this, he concluded that all substances can have the reverse effect to that expected, and he advanced this idea to the notion that extremely diluted compounds would reverse their effect.

18th-century physician Samuel Hahnemann

Hahnemann promoted other crackpot medical theories, all devoid of evidence, but only one, homeopathy, outlived him, perhaps because of a coincidence. Also in 1796, Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine. Science shows that our immune system learns from the diseases it encounters (if we survive) so we typically only get many diseases once in our lifetime. Vaccination triggers the immune response in the human body with a dead, deactivated, very small, or slightly different dose of the pathogen. We get the immunity, without suffering – or dying of – the disease.

Jenner created the vaccine when he noticed that milkmaids who contracted the minor disease cowpox never suffered from the deadly, scarring smallpox. Vaccines have saved millions of lives. On 8 May 1980, the WHO declared smallpox eradicated.

There is no connection between homeopathy and vaccination, but it isn’t hard to see how, in the eighteenth century, confusion would arise between two medicines where a very small dose of ‘the disease’ gave protection from it. Homeopathy cured nothing but, along with prayer and magic, it was often safer than going to an eighteenth-century doctor who offered leeches, bloodletting and poisons like mercury.

Along with homeopathy, these fell into obscurity at the start of the twentieth century. Medicines could be tested methodically, and the placebo effect filtered out with double-blind testing, where neither doctor nor patient know if they are using the real drug or a sugar pill – vaccination worked, homeopathy didn’t.

In the 1970s, renewed interest in homeopathy coincided with a rise in the environmental movement. It’s message, often critical of ‘chemical’ and ‘artificial’ medicines from the pharmaceutical industry resonated strongly, and homeopaths cashed in. The industry has grown to taking US$2.9bn in revenues in the United States alone, according to the Irish Society of Homeopaths.

Homeopaths claim that the expensive pills that they sell contain an extreme dilution of compounds that cause the problem that they claim to cure; for example they say that caffeine is in homeopathic ‘sleeping pills’. However the ‘dilution’ is so vast, that to get a single molecule of caffeine, you would need to take a pill with a diameter of 150 million km – the distance from the Earth to the Sun. All the homeopathic ‘sleeping pills’ ever made contain far less caffeine than you would inhale walking past a coffee shop.

Fake sleeping pills may be harmless, but Jacqueline Alderslade, 55, an asthmatic from Co Mayo wasn’t so lucky. She went to a homeopath who persuaded her to give up conventional medicines because her symptoms ‘weren’t really asthma’, and replace them with a homeopathic ‘cures’. She suffered a severe asthma attack and died. Paul Howie, also from Mayo, was advised by the same homeopath that if he resorted to ‘conventional’ medicine for his neck problems, it would kill him. In fact, he was suffering from a treatable tumour, and the failure to seek treatment led directly to his death.

There have also been many deaths of people who refused or delayed getting real treatment because of their faith in a homeopath, in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere. BBC reporters approached homeopaths under cover saying they were preparing to travel to Africa. The homeopaths sold them useless pills to ‘fill the malaria-sized hole in your aura’ and omitted basic medical advice, such as sleeping in mosquito nets.

On seeing the report , Dr Ron Behrens of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said

“We’ve certainly had patients admitted to our unit with the malignant form of malaria who have been taking homeopathic remedies and without a doubt the reason that they were taking them and not effective drugs was the reason they had malaria.”

Many homeopaths operating in Ireland go to great lengths to convey an image of professionalism, displaying impressive-looking certificates and using medical jargon. Doctors aren’t perfect, and must often answer ‘I don’t know’. It is easy to see how vulnerable people are taken in by reassuring frauds who seem competent and promise a treatment for any ailment. The payouts for homeopaths – partly from the taxpayer – from health insurance contribute to this fraudulent image.

People, though entitled to spend their money on any nonsense they want, are also entitled to protection from those who would profit by risking their health or their lives.

• The government should immediately end the tax relief on any health insurance plan that makes payouts for magical-based cures.
• The civil liability laws should be changed so that any person or company who presents themselves as having medical or medical-like knowledge (through word or deed) should be exposed to full financial liability if their medicines or advice leads to an adverse outcome for their client.

Last week, the Finnish government launched an online system where Finns can submit petitions which, if supported by 50,000 more citizens, will go before the Finnish parliament. Meanwhile, the US Patent Office released a system where the public can comment on patent applications for inventions.

These are the type of things that I advocated when I wrote Here’s How, Creative Solutions for Ireland’s Economic and Social Problems; there are dozens of ways technology and good ideas can improve the way we are governed, either at zero or negative cost.

The US Patent Office’s move is a particularly good one – wrongly granting patents causes serious problems, but examining each application is a long and costly process, though vital to the economy. That’s where the nerds enthusiasts come in. For every technical area, there are people who love the detail. Terrible if they corner you at a party, brilliant if you need to analyse a complex issue; many of the enthusiasts are eager to comment on patent applications in their area of interest. The trivial cost of a website to accept comments is paid back many times over by the value of the input.

There are a thousand more smart ways to improve governance, or reduce its cost, or both. Also last week, I delivered a copy of my book to each TD and Senator. Coincidentally, on the same day, the Oireachtas scrapped the XML feed of Dáil and Seanad speeches. XML is vital – let me tell you why, without making you feel that I have trapped you at a party.

It’s great if people can read web pages like this one. But it’s really useful if computers can read web pages. Websites like SkyScanner.ie can collect and display airfares from airlines’ websites, and millions more websites talk to other websites and display information together that is much more useful than any single data source. Anyone with a computer and a bit of enthusiasm can do clever things using data from other XML websites.

KildareStreet.com is – or was – a website created in 2009 by volunteers who fundraised €5,000 to cover costs. They used the XML feed from the Oireachtas website to allow users to search Dáil and Seanad speeches, which is particularly important since the Oireachtas’ own website is a disaster. Proof of its importance is this: more than one third of KildareStreet.com’s hits came from Leinster House itself. And it didn’t cost taxpayers a cent.

On Tuesday the Oireachtas, without warning or explanation, terminated their use of XML. For a computer, a website with XML is like a telephone book – regular and predictable so you can quickly find the information you need. Without XML it doesn’t look different for human users, but for the computer, it’s a bowl of alphabet soup.

When asked why this had happened, Oireachtas IT staff gave an answer that seemed to indicate they had no understanding of the issue, although they’re not the worst. Look at this disaster of a website from the clowns at the PTRB. They put the list of rental properties in a slew of dozens of Microsoft Excel files, presumably because they commute to work each morning from 1993. They don’t even need to make a website, they could just put the raw data online and I, or a thousand others, would be happy to build a web front end for it.

And people could cross-reference it with – who knows what, crime statistics, tax fraud, NAMA properties – we don’t know what interesting things we will find until we can look. But it’s not going to happen. Because after an online furore, Oireachtas staff have agreed to meet KildareStreet.com volunteers to see if they will think about considering if they might undo the trashing of the single most useful website for Irish democracy.

Because it takes this much effort to get the Irish government out of reverse gear and into neutral. Because, while a website that well-connected politicians use might be defended from the cack-handed stupidity of civil servant ‘experts’, a website to help vulnerable tenants is left unworkable for years on end.

Ireland is failing because standing still seems like a victory over going backwards.

Tony Blair was quoted in Tuesday’s Journal saying “society won’t be better if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street”. This comes as Seán FitzPatrick, two of his executives and the Quinns appear, occasionally, in courts and cells. Regardless of the outcome of those individual cases, Blair makes clear he believes that no energy should be expended on prosecuting white-collar criminals.

He’s wrong. I’m not big into hanging, but if hanging it is, then Ireland would be a vastly better place if the collars on certain expensive shirts were swapped for nooses.

A decade ago, long-time senator Joe O’Toole made the same argument as Blair. In 2002, at what we thought was the height of Irish scandals, when the first Flood Tribunal report was published, O’Toole said “I’d rather see them poor and free than rich and in jail”. These are harmless old men, the argument went, there’s no point in sending them to prison now.

Senator O’Toole’s view prevailed. Only Ray Burke was jailed, and him only briefly for failing to pay tax on a cash payment from Century Radio founder Oliver Barry which the Flood Report unambiguously ruled was an ‘enormous bribe’. Neither Burke nor Barry were ever arrested or questioned about the bribe, never mind charged or brought to trial.

O’Toole was wrong, and Blair is wrong, for three reasons. First, regardless of the crime, it is immoral to suggest that some classes in our society are immune to the law. Secondly, as we are seeing, extracting ill-gotten gains is difficult and unlikely to be totally successful; the crooks will be left far from poor. Thirdly, pour encourager les autres.

Things have happened while the Flood Report has been gathering dust in a cellar in Garda HQ. Lots of things. Decisions were made, laws were broken, risks were taken, outcomes calculated.

Greedy men weighed the risk of breaking the law to hang onto their millions and billions. They balanced the odds. The prize was high and, they knew, even when the evidence was plain, the risk of going to jail was very low.

Would those calculations, which contributed to the economic cataclysm that has befallen us, have been tilted differently were Haughey, Burke, Barry, and a few more politicians, businessmen and bishops spending their declining years in Mountjoy jail? We don’t know. But surely people making those calculations would pause.

Perhaps, after pausing, they would have continued their crimes anyway; but perhaps not. If we are to avoid a repeat, we must change the odds. We can’t reduce the rewards of corruption, but we can increase the risk. Crime might not seem so appealing to people whose golfing buddies have swapped the clubhouse for the jailhouse.

Neither might starting illegal wars.

The difference between Libor and Dibor tells us why Ireland is failing.

London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) is an interest rate which British banks charge when they lend each other money. Banks recalculate it every day under precise rules; it is important because thousands of major commercial loans have their interest rates set by reference to Libor.

Barclays, it appears, were supplying false information for the Libor calculation, to manipulate it up or down to suit their exposure to the market. Their customers would then be contracted to pay higher (or be paid lower) interest rates than they should have been. The contracts would have been enforced correctly, but based on bad external data.

Probes began after media speculation in 2008 noting that the Libor interest rate did not appear to reflect market conditions. While nobody has yet been arrested, much less charged or convicted, following intense investigations Barclays Bank have admitted misconduct and paid hundreds of millions in euro in penalties to authorities in Britain and the US.

Within days Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond resigned. Bank chairman Marcus Agius resigned from both Barclays and the British Bankers Association. Britain’s Serious Fraud Office is considering criminal charges. UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced a parliamentary review of the banking sector, led by the chairman of the powerful Treasury Committee. Investigations are beginning into whether other UK banks have been up to similar practices.

If Barclay’s Libor swindle operation was a sophisticated cat-burglar in the night, Anglo Irish Bank seems to have been a daylight smash-and-grab.

The equivalent Dublin Interbank Offered Rate (Dibor) was used by Irish banks, including Anglo, to set interest rates for many of their business customers.

In 2010, Anglo chief exec Mike Aynsley confirmed that, rather than undertaking sophisticated manoeuvres to manipulate the Dibor to its advantage, Anglo simply lied. Day after day, with client after client, Anglo simply overstated the correct interest rate by a margin of one-quarter to one-half of a percentage point. The false rates may have accounted for 10 per cent of Anglo profits, for up to a decade.

Dibor is publicly-available information, so they were betting that nobody would notice that the rates they were being charged were wrong. For nearly 15 years, it seems, nobody did.

While the UK and US corporate justice systems are far from ideal, they are at least imposing heavy fines; senior people are losing their jobs, and some may yet lose their liberty. In Ireland, despite clear indications fraud, nobody has been arrested, no investigations have been started, nobody has been appointed to find the guilty.

And nobody has been tasked with making sure it never happens again. Which is why it will happen again.

Knowledge of this fraud has been in the public domain for nearly two years, although it was very thinly reported – the word ‘Dibor’ was not mentioned even once in Irish mainstream news sources in relation to this scandal. Nobody is noticing still. Nobody is noticing, nobody is being prosecuted, and nothing is changing. That is why Ireland is failing.

Google tells us lots. At the time of writing, the term ‘salami slicing’ occurs on over 43,000 British web pages. Fewer than one thousand dot ie web pages contain that phrase, and most of them relate to Northern Ireland.

The phrase is so rare in Ireland that it needs an explanation. ‘Salami slicing’ means a particular type of budget cut. In Britain, it means cuts where all areas of expenditure are simply shrunk by a percentage dictated from the top. Though eclipsed by our own crisis, Britain is going through its own expenditure cuts, but our neighbours are hotly debating exactly what should and shouldn’t be cut.

In 2009, Ireland’s first major ‘cuts’ budget in our recent crisis, was a textbook case of salami slicing. The total government budget was cut by 3.8 per cent. But the variation between departments was razor-thin, with only tiny differences between the cuts for spending departments. Drilling down, the same pattern was repeated, with only the tiniest variations between different sections within departments.

This is the worst sort of management, with no thought about how clever efficiencies can be made, no thought about which services are more necessary than others, no thought about which services are more wasteful, and no thought about combining cost savings with modernisation.

How can we combine cost-savings with reform? By analysing every process and questioning whether it can be reformed, better done by someone else, or simply abandoned.

Hundreds of staff are employed in dozens of offices across the country compiling the electoral register, in a system unchanged in centuries. But there are still problems with the database – one record in three is wrong. The staff currently compiling the electoral register should be made redundant. The revenue and welfare departments have a far more accurate database of every adult in the country, and tiny changes would allow it to be exported as an electoral roll whenever required.

That is harsh for those staff, but the question that we need to answer is whether Ireland needs to employ them more than it needs A&E nurses or special needs teachers; and whether the purpose of the public service is to provide services for the public, or employment for people who are doing an unnecessary job, badly.

It is crazy that Ireland does not store the PPS number (or company registration number) of the owner of every vehicle – it would be a simple addition to the database of registered vehicles, and could be achieved within one year if it was required the next time motor tax is paid. Once done, motor tax could be collected by adjusting the tax-free allowance, social welfare payments or other taxes of the owner. At a stroke another enormous bureaucracy could be abolished.

An Post collects TV licences. Why? Because it was the default institution of society a century ago, when the system began, and nobody has thought to change it since. Cable and satellite TV companies should be required, as a condition of their licence, to collect the licence fee on their direct debits, instantly completing 80 per cent of the job for free, and eliminating a huge proportion of non-compliance.

Whatever your opinion of the Property Tax, its implementation is distinctly twentieth-century. Environment Minister Phil Hogan said this week that non-payers will be sent a letter. In the post. There are dozens of reasons for recording the tax number of every property owner, including tackling money-laundering, planning irregularities and making conveyancing easier. Such a system could also allow the tax to be collected with the minimum of non-compliance, and without creating a monster bureaucracy to support it.

The Food Safety Authority, the National Transport Authority and the Office of Tobacco Control all have functions inspecting restaurants, taxis, pubs and other establishments, and there are other agencies that inspect services, products and premises for the public. These are mostly important functions, but it is crazy that they don’t enlist the help of the public.

Restaurants, taxis and other establishments should be required to display a web address where members of the public could report concerns, which would allow targeted inspections and much better outcomes. We could develop a single smartphone app for such reports, which would send instant reports of dirty restaurants or dangerous taxis to the correct agency.

There is no doubt that such an innovation would hugely improve the service these agencies give to the public, but they should also save the taxpayer money. These two objectives are not in competition – we must break out of the mindset that says there is a straight-line relationship between the money we pay and the service we receive, and value can never be improved.

Innovations considered space-ago a decade ago are now commonplace in the pockets of teenagers. Those benefits should be applied in the public sector as well in the private sector, and the benefits will include improved service and reduced costs.

First we must abandon the mentality that all cuts are equal, and recognise that salami slicing is the worst type of cost-saving. The vocabulary to discuss how best to improve our public service barely even exists on Irish websites; this tells us how impoverished our public discourse is. It’s time to change that.

IN A RECENT column for TheJournal.ie, Aaron McKenna advocates devolving most of the powers of Irish government to what he calls our “castrated” county and town councils. He is wrong.

Irish local authorities (LAs) are bloated, incompetent, corrupt, sclerotic little fiefdoms who attempt to explain their uninterrupted record of failure by trotting out the lie that they ‘lack funds and powers’.

It is a lie. LAs spend in excess of €10billion a year, about 20 per cent of all government spending. McKenna doesn’t ask what they do with this vast amount of money, but I researched the topic for my book and was appalled at every fact I uncovered.

According to the Department of the Environment, LAs are responsible for: housing, planning, water supply and sewerage, recreation facilities, development incentives and controls, roads, environmental protection, agriculture, education and health.

LAs long ago lost responsibility for all except the first five items listed. Where they retain authority, their performance ranges from disastrous incompetence to catastrophic corruption.

They lost taxi regulation in 2004. For decades, they constricted the supply of taxi licences, creating havoc for consumers. Taxi-plate owners (rarely the drivers) employed Frank Dunlop to ‘lobby’ councillors. Taxi licences fetched up to €100,000 on the black market, attracting criminals eager to launder money, and commuters shivered in the rain.

There are 90 local authorities in Ireland with planning functions – responsible for creating zoning plans and giving planning permission. The banks, the developers, and the politicians who bailed them out are all getting their share of blame for the bust, but the LAs are getting off far too easily.

It was LAs who made many millionaires by converting farmland into estate after shoddily-built estate, far from employment, inaccessible on public transport, without a thought for schools or amenities for the residents, while vast tracts of inner-city brownfield sites decayed. LAs allowed the slapping up of concrete jungle ‘holiday developments’ that are ugly enough to guarantee tourists will never arrive.

Even where there is no money to be made in bribes, even when the task is mind-numbingly easy, and vital to our democracy – keeping an accurate list of voters – they can’t get it right. One entry in three on the electoral roll is wrong. Monkeys with typewriters could do better.

LAs report the cost of processing each student grant application – a basic bureaucratic function, implementing a rigid nationally-set formula. In Westmeath it costs €70.51, not cheap. In Tipperary North, it costs €484.25. Such vast variation indicates vast inefficiency.

Water and sewerage is one area where the LAs have genuine power, so many rural residents and tourists spend their summers vomiting cryptosporidium from their taps into their toilets. Everything local authorities touch turns into a fiasco: delays in driving tests, the disastrous implementation of penalty points, a country with fewer playgrounds than golf courses, the list goes on.

In the private sector, perform poorly and you will get your responsibilities and your budget cut. This minimises damage, and motivates performance. Politicians, unused to a world where merit is rewarded, reverse this idea. They want to reward failure with more power, and even more money.

I’m not surprised that politicians want more power and more money, but I am shocked that an otherwise clear-thinking Aaron McKenna has fallen for this. I am shocked because I expect that, like me, his private sector experience would tell him that increasing complexity in our society and economy is changing the way everything works.

Technology that allows companies to do things more efficiently also forces them to do less. McKenna’s company sells products from hundreds of companies, who source components and services from thousands more. If one company tired to take on the entire process of manufacturing even one piece of complex electronics, it would collapse under the workload.

Nobody expects each county in Ireland to have its own laptop factory, its own smartphone system or its own version of Facebook. Equally it is not reasonable to expect such tiny populations to contain the all the skills needed to manage complex tasks such as zoning , planning, or running a modern water and sewerage system.

The reason for the incompetence and inefficiency is that too-small organisations are taking on too many tasks. Corruption happens because the skill of management is also being spread too thinly; and when local officials often live in the same village as applicants, they can easily be bribed or put under to moral pressure to make the wrong call.

Ireland certainly needs radical reforms. One of the first should be to send the gelded old nags from our local councils to the knackers’ yard, not pretend that they are fit to run the Grand National.