The Brendan McDonagh affair is a disaster, plain and simple. It involved him in a lot of controversy simply because he was asked to do a job that the Government needed doing. And he is a man who has a high and honourable reputation, both at home and abroad, because of the job he does now and the way he does it. So it was doubly unfair to, if you’ll pardon the expression, dump him in the muck the way it was done.
In case you’re wondering, I wouldn’t know Brendan McDonagh if I met him in the street. I’ve never met him nor spoken to him, to the best of my knowledge. All I know about him is a track record where he can, hand on heart, claim to have served his country well.
When he was originally asked, in the middle of the worst financial crisis the country has ever seen, to effectively set up a brand-new State agency to take total responsibility for all the bad loans of all the bad banks in the country, I’m guessing he had a sleepless night or two before agreeing to leave his pretty comfortable job in the National Treasury Management Agency.
Despite all our scepticism about the very idea of the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) — and I’d have been one of the cynics — there is no denying that it played a major part in managing intolerable debt and in that way aiding confidence and recovery.
And yes, its CEO is very well paid, but I’m guessing too in the world he lives in he could probably command an even bigger salary if he were to leave the public service.
The fiasco also damaged the Government’s reputation. This is essentially the same government, give or take, that appointed and “disappointed” Katharine Zappone.
There are clearly lessons (about transparency, about communication) to be learned from previous experiences — and these are all experiences that must have left scars — and clearly none of those lessons have been learned.
But the real disaster is different. This whole thing is an admission by the Government that they want to outsource the management of the housing crisis.
And that’s nutty, absolutely nutty.
Many years ago, Garret Fitzgerald’s government urgently needed a national roads plan. When he asked for a plan, he was given a 40-page memo from the relevant government department about why it couldn’t be done, and even if it could be done how long it would take (not to build the roads but to produce the plan), how many consultants would be needed to write it, how much its production would cost.
He summoned the top five officials of the department, together with their minister, to his office. He showed them a rough sketch he had done on a map of Ireland, with a ring road around Dublin, a motorway north, a motorway south (heading to Limerick and branching off in the midlands to Cork), and a motorway west.
How long will it take, he wanted to know, to flesh out this sketch and turn it into a real plan.
When they opened their 40-page memo he said: ‘No. Bring me a draft by next Monday.’ They left in high dudgeon, but they brought back a first draft a week later. He sent it back, and they met again another week later
After about six meetings, the first real draft of the national roads plan was produced and the finished document was published about three months later.
We’re still driving on those motorways and dual carriageways, because Fitzgerald turned himself into a roads tsar until the plan was up and running.
The only reason we need a tsar now apparently is not because we don’t know how many houses we need, or where they need to be built, or how much money we need to raise.
The main job we want a tsar to do is to get rid of bottlenecks. That’s the minister’s, or the Government’s job. What are the bottlenecks?
- There’s the building and design itself;
- There’s infrastructure — water, energy, sewage, telecommunications;
- There are environmental issues;
- There’s agreement about standards — house and room sizes, quality of insulation, that kind of thing;
- There are quality of life issues — green space, safety, amenity, space of safe play;
- And there are process issues — planning, procurement, value for money.
If you were the minister facing these obstacles, the first thing you’d do is write them down on a sheet of paper and assign responsibility for each of them to the relevant agency. You’d end up very quickly with a list of several government departments and several State companies.
And you’d realise that each of them is living in a bubble of their own. The planners aren’t working hand in glove with the water providers; the electricity company has no involvement in the building of the housing estate; everyone is doing their own thing.
So if you were the minister who was determined to fix this, you’d get real authority from the Government (the authority a ‘tsar’ would need) and then you’d gather all the relevant heads in a room — maybe about 12 chief executives. Monday morning, 9am, and every Monday after that until the bottlenecks began to be addressed by cohesive action.
These meetings would have to focus on solutions, and a report would go to the Government every week. You could also choose to publish those reports, say once a quarter.
Once you create a different dynamic, people in your group would start to look for wins. Wins means projects finally springing into life. Wins means hope.
Let me give you an example.
I’m intimately involved in a housing project in the inner city in Dublin.
There’s an agreed masterplan now, and a small team has been set up in the council to progress it. They’re working to a thing called a Gantt chart, a visual project management tool that you can look at to see what has to be done, to comply with all the requirements.
This housing project holds out the promise of more than 670 new housing units, green spaces, and community facilities, on a site that is essentially fully serviced and already owned by the State.
No brainer, right?
Well, the Gantt chart sets out 25 process steps before the project can be submitted for planning, and a further 18 steps after that before a sod is turned on the 670 desperately-needed homes.
With the fairest of fair winds a minimum of six years will elapse between the design of the masterplan and the beginning of construction.
Construction will take at least four more years. On a serviced site already owned by the State.
There is bottleneck after bottleneck in this project, and it’s just one of the hundreds of projects we need.
So yes, maybe a tsar is needed. But only if we’re willing to admit that our democratically accountable ministers don’t have the will and the capacity to drive the system the way it needs to be driven. The way governments used to make the system work in the past. By doing their jobs.