Ireland's Delivery Inability

Why Ireland fails to deliver its reforms, and pretty much everything else.

“Reforms in Rhetoric” by Vadim Koval

How is it possible for a country to buy 132 electric buses that cannot be used?

Not to fail to buy them, but to actually buy them in full with public money, and then to slowly realize that there is nowhere to charge them, because the same State that ordered the buses somehow did not order the charging points. Meaning that the buses now sit in a field, rotting away, while the diesel buses they were meant to replace are towed back out of retirement like work horses, and the bill for storing the ones that cannot move runs to nearly €7m.

How does a country arrange that? Precisely what sequence of meetings, sign-offs, and budget lines produces a fleet of vehicles that have no way of being powered? You would have to be trying to screw something up this badly. And the chair of the Public Accounts Committee, surveying the field of idle buses, called it “a serious litany of failures”, which was only half-correct, because that was not the full litany. It was just one line of it.

Because here’s another question for you. How is it possible to do this more than once?

How does the same State spend €50m building a single system to control the trains in the country, get most of the way there, rapidly lose confidence that it will ever work, write the whole thing off, and then turn around and spend €20m more keeping the medieval system it was supposed to replace alive, so that the trains now run on the dead corpse of the thing the new thing was meant to bury?

When that one reached the Public Accounts Committee earlier this year, a member said there was “a growing sense of Groundhog Day” and he was right, because the committee had sat through almost exactly this the year before, when the Arts Council came in to explain how a computer system budgeted at €3m had actually cost €6.7m and been abandoned with €5.3m simply gone, yet with nothing delivered. The independent review into that one produced the single most Irish sentence in the modern history of the State. The project, it found, could have been halted at a dozen points along the way. But nobody said so.

While we’re at it, how is it possible to build the most expensive hospital on the face of the earth at an estimate of €650m, ballooning to over €2.8b, and still not have opened it, or have put any children in it? How is it possible to propose a metro for Dublin in 2001, when many of the people now stuck in the traffic it was meant to get rid of, were children, and to arrive in 2026 with not a single meter of it built, the boldest recent development being the government’s decision to create a body to deliver it. Which is all to say that it only took 24 years for someone to finally notice there was nobody in charge, before announcing that there soon would be?

How is it possible to be handed the Presidency of the European Union, and to spend somewhere between €300-400m on it (up from €50m the last time) because the State that is hosting the leaders of Europe cannot secure them, nor cannot guard its own airspace or seabed, and has to borrow Portuguese, French, and British police to secure its own capital while it plays host? “A champion jockey,” one former officer called the country, “without a horse.”

Ok. The failures I’ve just outlined are some of the many outcomes of when the State tries to build something, but cannot. Sadly, there is a whole other category of things it does not try to build, has never built, and in some cases does not even appear to have noticed it is missing — the institutions that in a normal European country would simply exist, and in Ireland simply… do not.

Ireland has no state construction company. It has one of the worst housing crises in the developed world and no state builder that can erect a house without paying a private developer to do it instead. It is the only country in Western Europe that never built universal primary care, meaning that six in ten citizens pay out of pocket to visit a GP, in a state that considers itself a social democracy and taxes them like one. And even for the patients who are inside the system, doctors cannot properly see them, as Ireland is the only country in the European Union without a national patient identifier, and one of only two where you cannot get your own medical records online. On the European scale of health digitization it scores 11/100 against an average of 79/100, and the solution of a single national record was first priced in 2015, but has since become a €2b program, and is scheduled to finish, if it ever finishes, in 2032.

The list goes on, across every single department. Ireland has no metro, in a capital that first drew up plans for one in 1922, before the State itself existed, and that remains one of the very few cities of its size in Europe without one. It had no postcode system until 2015, and was the last country in the developed world to build one; even now its own postal service cannot use the postcode to sort our mail. Ireland was among the last countries in the developed world to automatically enrol its workers into a pension, which was promised by government after government, but only happened after a third of private-sector workers spent those three decades with nothing between them and the state pension.

The Irish government has no statutory system of security clearance, with no way to formally clear a person to handle classified information. It has no capabilities between the Garda and the Army, such as a gendarmerie, or force of the kind that France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, and Romania all maintain. It has no means by which to monitor the undersea cables that carry the data of half the Western world past its coast, and is “reliant on allied notification” to learn if they are being cut. (But that information can’t be handed to Ireland because remember — we have no security clearances to get confidential data about security, even if it is our own). And from 2020 to 2025 it had no ministerial-level committee on national security at all, as the Cabinet subcommittee was wound up when the Taoiseach changed that summer, so that for five years the only body considering the State’s security was a committee of civil servants with no minister in the room.

It has no road-safety commissioner, in a country with the worst road-death toll in over a decade and the fastest-rising in Europe. The councils that repair the roads cannot even get the crash-location data of accidents and deaths to find the black spots, so the lethal stretches remain permanently lethal because nobody is allowed to know where they are. Ireland has pretty much no functioning insurance market of its own, as its claims and litigation regime is so broken that the world’s insurers have actually red-lined the country, mostly excluding Ireland from even rental-car cover in the same way they exclude war zones.

How? Just how?

This is staggering. Gravity-defying. Stupendously and cosmically confusing. It beggars belief. It defies not just an explanation but the expectation that an explanation might exist at all. You could not draw it on a whiteboard. You could not explain it to the outside world without being called a liar. It is an Escher staircase drenched in public money. It makes a total mockery of cause and effect. It is so consistently, elaborately, astonishingly absurd that at some point disbelief curdles into outrage at the suspicion that this is not chaos at all, that nothing this repeatable is random, and that somewhere beneath the nonsense there is a logic – there has to be a logic – only to find none.

HOW?

All of this is happening amidst the backdrop of record abundance. Does it make it better or worse to tell you that in Ireland, there has never been more money? The exchequer is overflowing, and the country sits near the top of the global wealth tables; above Germany, and even above Japan.

And meanwhile – perhaps this is a telling fact – the government has never in its history been larger. It has been stuffed with more people, more departments, more agencies, all with more spending than at any point since the State was founded.

Overall, this is not the story of a poor country doing its best with too little but the exact opposite! These failures are not happening despite our fiscal abundance, they are happening in it, during it, and while absolutely drowning in it.

Which is what makes the “where is the money going” question the wrong one, and one that I’ve already answered via the Failure Premium. We know where our money is going — to expensive workarounds because nothing else exists. So the actual delivery failure itself is not one of funding, which is an easy problem to solve, but one of capacity.

Somewhere along the way this State stopped being able to build things, and no amount of money seems to be able to buy that back. And tragically, it seems to have made its peace with that. The inability to do anything is no longer felt as a failure, an emergency, or even a public shame. It is simply the way things are. Nobody is fighting for the capacity that was lost, because nobody in Leinster House experiences it as a loss.

Sadly, the people who would suffer from it are not in the room, and the people in the room do not suffer from it.

Shadow Government

Consider, for a moment, the sheer scale of what all this money is buying the Irish taxpayers.

There are somewhere north of 425,000 people who now sit on the State’s payroll, at a cost approaching €34 billion a year. The civil service alone has swollen by 46% in a decade. Meanwhile, the public service as a whole has grown by roughly 110,000 people since 2013 — yes, this is the population of a small city, which has been hired in a single generation, to oversee such nothingness. And so by any measure of inputs, this is one of the best-staffed, best-funded states in the entire democratic world!

So then… what’s the issue? How on earth can we make sense of this?

Worse, the payroll I’ve just mentioned is only the visible half of the State’s tentacles. Beneath it runs a second workforce; a kind of shadow government if you will: the community and voluntary sector, employing around 190,000 people, more than half of whose income of over €7 billion a year comes directly from the State. The State is, by a distance, the single biggest funder of the entire sector. I should say here that these are not, as the angrier corners of the internet insist, “activists and lobbyists” (which are a rounding error). These people are the ones who actually run the disability services, the home care, the addiction clinics, the hospices, the hospital wards, and more. The work they do is the work that, in nearly every other country in Europe, is simply done by the State itself, and that here has been parceled out to a parallel apparatus that the State funds and depends on entirely but can barely see or control.

So when you put the two together, the State and the shadow government, you get something like 600,000 people who are delivering state-funded services in this country, in a total workforce of 2.8 million. That’s one worker in five. One in five.

Has your mind started to buckle yet? Because if you are like me, you would expect — and you would be entitled to expect — that a delivery apparatus of that size, fed by that much money, would… deliver. It would move both heaven and earth, throwing up hospitals and metros and houses in a blur of concrete à la Beijing. Instead you get the litany this essay began with.

So the only thing the State has actually built, in all these years of record hiring and record spending, is this canyon of a gap, widening every year, between our record inputs and our record lack-of outputs. At a recent panel in Dublin, infrastructure folk argued that Ireland suffers from a lack of certainty in the delivery of Irish projects. Au contraire, I argued, the lack of delivery is the most certain thing about Ireland. And indeed this gap between what goes in and what comes out is the only thing that we deliver most consistently.

The Delivery Inability

So where did the Delivery Inability come from?

We are all familiar, of course, with the complaint that an unelected NGO sector has captured the State and runs it from behind a curtain. And I understand why it feels like it makes sense, because it gives us a villain in this story, and a group to point our finger at. However, this causation is actually backwards — NGOs did not seize anything.

Look at the many bodies now delivering the State’s services, including the voluntary hospitals, the disability providers, and the great care charities. What do they have in common? They were founded by religious orders, by philanthropists, and by parishes, and were helping the sick and poor on the island before there was even an Irish government that existed. When the State finally arrived, then, it did not replace them but instead decided to fund them, and the State spread up around them the way weeds come up through old cracks in the paving, taking whatever space the cracks allowed, while writing cheques to the entities that already existed. And in the meantime, never getting around to building the apparatus of the State itself. But it’s not like there was never a cabinet meeting at which this particular form of state architecture was chosen, which is actually nearly the problem.

And out of this long non-decision and avoidance of building its own mechanisms, the State has produced an administrative artefact so bewildering but that explains our dysfunction at nearly every level. Under the Health Act of 2004, the bodies providing care on the State’s behalf fall into two categories.

• Section 38 bodies deliver services on behalf of the HSE, and there are about forty of them, employing roughly 40,000 people who are for all practical purposes public servants on HSE pay scales, with public pensions.

• Section 39 bodies deliver services ancillary to the HSE, with more than two thousand of them, whose staff are not public servants, are not on public pay scales, and are not pensioned to the same standard.

Yet, they do the same work.

So, you see what happened? The State was asked a simple question: “are these people our employees or not?”, and could not answer it. So it did what it always does when it meets a decision it cannot make: it bypassed it entirely. It created two categories, and placed people doing identical jobs onto incompatible legal footings, and left this “solution” as the status quo for twenty years.

Those Section 39 pay disputes that make it onto the news every few winters as the same care workers stand on the same picket lines in the sideways rain, forcing the state to pay, once again, the interest on this decision it cannot bring itself to make.

But underneath the indecision of the state-but-not-state is the actual issue. In the disability sector, as it has been said bluntly in the national press, it has become impossible to figure out who owns what, as the State cannot see what is on the inside of these funded NGOs.

The political scientist James C. Scott wrote a famous book, Seeing Like a State, warning about governments that see too much. Amazingly, Ireland has achieved the perfect inversion of his nightmare! A state that cannot understand what it oversees at all, as it cannot price the services it buys, cannot compare one provider with another, and cannot tell what is doing well from what is failing, because across thousands of separately incorporated bodies there is no set of common standards, no comparable accounting, no accountability, no strategy and no idea, even if there was a strategy, if it might be moving in the right direction.

And, even worse, this is not just about the NGOs and charities.

Look at what the State does with the private sector! The top ten consultancy firms have been paid over €2 billion by the government in the past thirteen years. In 2024 a single department, Social Protection, was paying around €1.4m a week to consultancies for IT projects. Back in 2009 to 2016, Cork City Council spent €26.3m on external consultants over seven years — to plug the gaps left by austerity layoffs that had stripped out its permanent staff. There, in just a single line of municipal accounting, is the whole goddam problem. The State cuts its own capacity, then rents that capacity back, permanently, at… you guessed it… a premium.

But who delivers the most damning verdict on all this? Not a critic. Not even me!

It’s the Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers himself, announcing an intention to cut the consultancy spend on the grounds that it was adding — in his own words — costs, delays, and significant fragmentation. So even a minister of the government, correctly diagnosing the outsourcing architecture that produces the very dysfunction it was hired to cure. And yet… nothing changes.

Four Locks

So why does nobody fix it? Is it because Leinster House is really a royal court staffed entirely by jesters who are motley-clad and bell-capped, pratfalling from one crisis to the next, tripping over each other on the way to the next photograph opportunity, and too busy juggling the media to actually do something?

While that may be true, it’s not the reason for the Delivery Inability. The actual mechanism is more boring.

In short, reform requires four conditions that must hold at the same time, and the Irish delivery State is arranged — not designed, but arranged — so that all four are absent at once. I’ve called them the Four Locks.

First Lock: there is no agent.

Reform needs someone whose job it is to actually own the authority to do the reforms. Yet in Ireland, delivery is dispersed across 40 Section 38 bodies, 2,000-ish Section 39 bodies, thousands of charities, a gaggle of consultancies, and a dozen departments. Each with a separate legal entity with a different board, different accounts, and different lawyers. So when you ask the question of “who reforms this”, there is no answer. It’s not that it’s a difficult answer, it’s that it doesn’t exist.

Second Lock: there is no map.

Ireland is, famously, brilliant at diagnosing its issues. There is no country on earth producing more eloquent accounts of its own failures. But what reform actually needs is direct insight into the system being reformed with real-time and costed data that you can measure success on. How many patients, at what cost, with what result, compared against whom. And that is what the State does not have. It has no patient identifier, so it cannot count patient numbers, just as it has no road crash data in the right hands, so it cannot amend the black spots. It cannot cost the services it buys from its own shadow workforce, because across thousands of separately funded bodies there is no common ledger. So Ireland can describe its problems in phenomenal prose and yet still be unable to act. The single number it can see with perfect clarity is what it spends, which is why spending is the only thing we ever truly manage to argue about.

Third Lock: there is no slack.

Reform needs the ability to change something while it is still running. Hence, any reform is one that must be completed at full load, and in an electoral cycle in which the visible risk of attempting reform will always exceed the visible risk of deferring. Deferral is therefore always, in the moment, the “correct” choice, which is how an outcome that is ultimately catastrophic will always be chosen over and over by people who are… dare I say… individually reasonable.

Fourth Lock: nothing survives.

In one of my recent meetings to propose policy reforms in the UK, the first thing a fellow policy reformer said was: but what mechanism will make it survive the next five leadership changes? He was referring to the fact that reform needs to outlast the person who starts it, especially since the government is built to forget. Secretaries General rotate all the time, while budgets are annual, and the electoral horizon is only five years. So even if a reform clears the first three locks, if it cannot live long enough to finish because its sponsor is gone, or its plan is inherited by someone who did not write it and gains nothing from either finishing it, then it’s kaput.

So, to clear all four locks at once, you would need exactly the coordinating institution whose absence is the thing being reformed. In other words, in its current position, Ireland cannot reform its way out of this chaotic mess, because reform itself requires the capacity that it does not have, and is unwilling to acquire.

Slán, Sláintecare

Over the last six months, I have been engaged in a policy reform agenda in Irish road safety. While some people might think this quite a strange thing for me to do, it’s actually not. In order to understand the Irish political reform system, you need to test it. And the best way to test the most basic functions of government policy is to take a topic that people actually want reformed, and for which there are no obvious trade-offs and losers, and roll your sleeves up and try to do it.

Road safety is close to a perfect test case, because nobody is for people dying on the roads, there is no powerful lobby defending the status quo, and the evidence on what works features in numerous academic journals. If the Irish State can deliver anything, it should be able to deliver this.

And what I have learned is that it can’t. Even more revealingly, that it fails in a very familiar way to a far larger, far more visible reform that came before it.

Sláintecare was possibly the most serious reform attempt in the history of the State. It was a decade-long, cross-party plan devised by an all-party Oireachtas committee in 2017 and explicitly built to lift health policy above the electoral cycle. It was designed, in other words, to pick the Four Lock (survivability), and existed with a dedicated program office, an executive director (called Laura Magahy), and an implementation council chaired by Professor Tom Keane.

Yet in September, 2021, both of them resigned.

The problem identified at the heart of it was this: the two most senior people responsible for Sláintecare were expected to implement it without the actual authority to deliver it.

Responsibility without authority is the First Lock. In fact, everyone close to the program named the same solution: move Sláintecare to the Department of the Taoiseach, where it would carry actual authority. Instead? The office was placed inside the Department of Health, from where it was expected to reform the HSE and the Department from below and beside them, while able to control neither, and dependent for its budget and its mandate on the very bodies it existed to restructure.

In other words, it was dead on arrival.

Keane’s resignation letter contains a phrase that should be framed in all government buildings:

“Sadly, I have come to conclude that the requirements for implementing this unprecedented programme for change are seriously lacking.”

Then the Third Lock closed, as there was not enough slack in the system to carry out the reforms, on the grounds of the pandemic — the Minister stated that the timing was not right for structural reform in an emergency. And sure, the pandemic was real. But… is there ever a good time to restructure a health service? Because a health service is always running at full capacity, and so “the timing is not right” is not really an observation about the timing at all. If a reform can only proceed when the service is not under strain, in an industry that is permanently strained, then the reform is not possible.

But how do we know Sláintecare failed because of the Locks, and not just incompetence? How do we know it wasn’t merely botched by people who weren’t up to the job, and that the whole Four Locks theory isn’t a fancy way of excusing plain idiocy? Well, rather excitingly, this set of reforms could be A/B tested, because the management (Tom Keane) has completed healthcare reforms before.

In fact, the National Cancer Control Programme which he led is an internationally admired Irish success. So here you have the same man, in the same country, with the same civil service, and the same political class. What was different with the National Cancer Control Programme was not the person managing the reforms, but the fact that cancer control was bounded, and so it could be handed a real delivery agent with authority over its own domain. Sláintecare, on the other hand, was cross-cutting, spanning the HSE, the Department, the treatment fund, and the voluntary hospitals, and with nobody who saw over the whole thing.

The lesson here is not that Ireland cannot find good people to manage radical transformation, but that Ireland builds its entire structure specifically to defeat them.

Cosplay

So if the State is bigger than it has ever been, and delivering less than it has ever delivered, then what, exactly, are all these people doing all day?

They are performing.

The Taoiseach stands at lecterns in front of Irish branded backdrops and launches more ten-year frameworks that are Extremely, Very Serious™. Summits are attended and delegates are photographed. Strategies are published, albeit decades late, and visions appear in frameworks. Announcements are announced. White papers are launched and task forces are stood up. Every gesture of a functioning European state is executed with fluency, despite the actual mechanisms for government not existing underneath it all.

Remember, this is a government that has learned to govern through miming. It solemnly deliberates without any actual power to decide on anything, while offering up the faux gravitas of someone who knows they can never be held to account. This is a multi-decade-long game of cosplay. Which would be funny, if it were not the reason a child with a disability waits three years for their first assessment, or a family raises its children in a hotel room, or someone dies on a trolley in a hospital corridor.

Most infuriatingly, though, this pathetic performance goes unpunished, year after year, because of the second thing the Irish State architecture produces. Because while it is not only true that the system cannot deliver, it is similarly true that no one inside it can be blamed for the fact that it doesn’t.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, when writing about bureaucracy, called it “rule by Nobody,” outlining an eerily Irish situation in which “there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done.” She could have been describing Ireland long before it was built.

And once no one can be blamed, the overused playbook opens up, comprising a set of tired moves for absorbing public anger without ever having to deliver anything .

ONE: Announce the plan, any plan, and watch the political pressure for change immediately disappear, since the announcement is the deliverable.

TWO: Commission a review, and voila, you have converted angry public demand for action into a calm private demand for analysis, which can be met, at length, by consultants over a time period that ensures everybody has forgotten the initial anger.

THREE: Establish the task force, and the clock resets once more.

FOUR: Fund the service without ever owning the services, and all the credit is yours (just make sure the liability is someone else’s). All you need to do now is cut the ribbon in public, while someone else runs the thing into the ground.

FIVE: Set a ten-year target, and by the time it is missed you will have moved department twice. And when it fails — because it will — point in a random direction to the arm’s-length agency, the NGO service provider, the Section 39 body, the contractor, the independent regulator, and say, with total honesty, that none of this mess was quite yours.

The Conduit State

So what are we left with? Look at the departments, the agencies, the shadow workforce, the consultancies, the private-sector-which-is-really-public-sector. Now ask yourself: what is the Irish State’s core activity?

It is doing little more than acting as the administration system of the distribution of endless amounts of money, while managing prolific outsourcing.

Money comes in at insanely world-class levels of efficiency, and money goes out at insanely world-class levels of inefficiency. And yet in-between, the State administers the contracts, manages the relationships, and holds endless tours of press conferences, all done carelessly and badly. It is, when you strip it down to its core set of activities, a payments processor. And a bad one, at that.

Which is completely unsurprising, given that the Irish government is just doing the same task, one level up, as Ireland’s economy: acting as a conduit; a place through which the profits of the largest corporations on earth flow, and where they are taxed lightly, before being passed on. Our conduit economy is a country that grew extraordinarily wealthy by merely being the entity through which other peoples’ money passes. It should not shock us, then, that it has produced a conduit government to match, with an apparatus superbly organized to do little other than move money from one place to another while being almost entirely unable to convert that money into a thing that exists in the physical world.

Perhaps the answer, then, is to demand that someone be brave. That a minister seize the their position and, god forbid, fully use it; that an official would just once refuse to accept the nothingness; that somebody, somewhere, stand up and just fucking do something.

However, I have come to think this demand is not just inadequate but wrong, because it misunderstands what the Four Locks actually do.

Sláintecare was brave. I mean, these reforms at least started with authority and a mandate from every party in the Dáil, and yet they were gone within four years. Why? Because bravery met those damned Locks I just described and found them inescapable. Bravery was never the missing ingredient, leverage was. Therefore a brave person with no authority, no visibility into the system, with no slack, and backed by no institutional memory cannot reform anything.

Indeed, they are actually just ensuring that someone will fail more visibly than anybody else; this person who will eventually be replaced by someone who watched them publicly fail and that can come to the only rational lesson available: do not repeat this yourself.

What is therefore horrendously bleak is that the tragedy of the Irish State has little to do with nobody trying; it is that the trying does not matter, because there is nothing to try against. You can hosepipe the courage, competence, and eighty-hour weeks of the best managers in the world into a system with no agency or accountability, and the system will absorb every ounce of that energy and deliver nothing, while exhausting everyone who tried. All the while forgetting the whole thing by the next morning. Frustratingly, the architecture of our State doesn’t even resist reform the way a strong and mortal enemy resists attack. It dissolves it by dispersing it through the millions of state-backed tentacles.

And once outcomes can no longer be pinned to a single person, the argument we have about our unhappiness with the situation moves onto the one thing we can actually fight about. Last week, Leo Varadkar publicly stated that the criticism that stings him most is when people question his motivation for entering politics.

I want you to sit with how strange this is.

Now, in a country that judged its leaders on what they built, the criticism that would cut deepest is the obvious one:

• the houses weren’t built,

• the hospital didn’t open,

• the lists got longer on your watch.

But that is not Varadkar’s issue. His complaint is the questioning of motive, and whether he was sincere; whether his heart was in the right place, and whether he meant it. What stings is a question about him, not the failures of his office. And this is enormously revealing, because it is the emotional sign of a state that does not expect to judge its leaders on delivery at all. When nobody can be held to account for outcomes because the dispersion of accountability makes outcomes unattributable, the only battlefield left is character.

Therefore, sincerity becomes the most used currency in Irish political life precisely because delivery cannot be. And so you get a political class that argues, endlessly and oh-so-passionately, about whether its leaders are good people, having long ago lost the ability, or indeed the expectation, to measure whether they were any good at the job.

Which is the most exacting reason that bravery is beside the point. Notice who does well out of a state that cannot deliver: not the commuter stuck in traffic, not the patient, and certainly not the family in temporary accommodation, but the people who run it.

And they do well for a very specific structural reason. Reward in Ireland has been completely, utterly and savagely cut loose from delivery results, and attached instead to tenure.

Now, I am an investor. And needless to say that at the hedge fund where I work, all eyes are on who delivers what. My pay and my performance are chained together, brutally and in real time; meaning that if I stop delivering, I stop being paid, simple. And there is nothing personal about this; it’s not a hardship I am complaining about. It is just the price of the reward of upside, and most people reading this likely live inside some version of what I’ve described.

Now set this beside the architecture that runs the Irish State. There, the salary of the minister who does not build the metro is identical, down to the euro, to the salary of a minister who does. Likewise the pension of the Ireland, Inc official who presides over a decade of non-delivery is identical to the pension of one who delivers. The compensation is automatically handed to the title, not the work done with that title. And even worse, someone who underperforms in the Irish public sector is most likely to be rotated out, promoted on schedule, and quickly pensioned long before the consequences of anything they did or failed to do ever arrive — as their punishment.

Well, if you’re not angry already, here’s more, in the form of one example of many. The people overseeing the delivery failure managed to secure for themselves the one thing the State could not be arsed to build for anyone else. They gave themselves gold-plated, defined-benefit security, in a country that left every ordinary private worker with nothing between them and the state pension until auto-enrolment finally limped into existence, thirty years late. The one retirement this State ever delivered, on time and in full, was the retirement of the very people in charge of the retirements no one else got.

So if you want to discuss bravery, don’t even bother asking where the courage is. Because in a structure like this, having courage is actually irrational, and everyone in it is clever enough to know that. If you’re rewarded regardless of wheter you deliver or not, the only certain way to lose such a reward is to attempt reforms bold enough that could fail in public. Which is why the fence-sitting we all despise is not cowardice at all but the most immoral and grotesque form of intelligence.

And this is a far more damning thing to say than our government is filled with cowards, because cowardice is a personal flaw you might one day be able to shame out of someone, whereas this is a mechanism of incentives built so enduringly that people actually seem to take pride in behaving accordingly.

Behind the Curtain

And yet here is the part I find myself unable to write with the same contempt I have written everything up to now. The people inside this machine are not lazy, and most of them are not fools. They are exhausted. You see, a State with no institutional memory meets every problem for the first time, every single morning… forever. In the same way that a State with no visibility into itself has to reconstruct that entire knowledge before it can suggest a single reform. And a State with no owner has to convene fifteen bodies who have no duty to cooperate before it can even start a meeting. So why would you bother?

The officials inside the Irish apparatus are not busy instead of being effective, they are busy because effectiveness has been made impossible. This system takes smart, capable, and hardworking people, and grinds their effort into the same nothingness which they produce, at industrial scale. And it has been doing this for so long, that it does not even know that this is what it is doing.

There are two sides to every coin, and the same unaccountability that shields these “one-in-five” public-sector workers from blame, also shields them just as completely from gaining knowledge or progressing with their ideas and reforms. Every one of the Four Locks is a barrier against trying something as much as a barrier against doing something.

Which means that the State cannot perceive the overwhelming extent of its own failure, because it has dismantled every single piece, and every metric, measurement, or policy that would have allowed that failure to be measured. Indeed, the architecture of our state creates a system that has blinded even the people who control this sprawling mess to the damage that their not-doing is doing, leaving them laboring devotedly in the wreckage of their own chaos, genuinely convinced they are doing the best job they can.

This is what the word cosplay means, I suppose. Not that Irish politicians are “fraudulently” pretending to govern us, but that their white-paper launches and ten-year frameworks are what those in charge genuinely believe governing is. They don’t believe they’re cynically performing anything. There is no state that delivers our metros and hospitals hiding behind the curtain, waiting to surprise us all. There is only what we see, in front of us.

So, very sadly, the child with a disability waiting three years for an assessment is not waiting for better people, just as the family raising its kids in one room of a hotel is not waiting for more money; and the man who dies on a trolley in a corridor did not die because there wasn’t enough bravery. They are all waiting for something other than courage, money or a change of government: a State that can actually build the things a State exists to build. And you cannot vote that into being at the next election, announce it, review it, or even stand up a task force to do it for you.

As I have said many times before, it has to be built deliberately by people willing to construct the boring machinery of delivery and outcomes; by the same people who are then willing to hand the credit to whoever comes after them.

Which is the one thing this State, above all others, has proven it cannot do.