How Woodrow Wilson and C.E. Trevelyan are to Blame for the Leinster House Bike Shed – and what to do about it

 Perhaps one of the most striking recent instances of the mismanagement of public moneys is that of the Leinster House bike shed. For those of you who don’t remember the details the Office of Public Works (OPW) spent a whopping €336,000 of public money on a bike shelter to be situated outside Leinster House.

This bike shelter did not double as house, music venue, nor death star, as one may reasonably expect considering its price tag. It didn’t even have walls. An external audit found that value-for-money assessments were not carried out. Duh.

Despite the scandal of the total absence of common sense in the spending of taxpayers’ money there remains a deficit of accountability. The Junior Minister responsible for the OPW at the time, Patrick O’Donovan, washed his hands of responsibility saying, “I wasn’t responsible for it.” He added soporifically, “I didn’t approve money for it because that’s not the role of the Minister of State for the Office of Public Works. The accounting officer within the Office of Public Works is the chairman, and then, as we’ve seen in the Public Accounts Committee hearings, depending on a person’s position in that organisation, they have different level of sign off with regards to their financial responsibilities, something I think the chairman is now, with the management board of the Office of Public Works, reviewing.” That remark cuts through to the heart of the problem, even if Minister O’Donovan doesn’t quite realise it.

The relevant senior Minister at the time, Paschal Donohue, however, did accept responsibility… ish. He said, “I’m a finance minister and the minister for public spending, but in accepting that responsibility, it’s also important to say I’m not the person who gets the bill in for any of those projects and decides to go ahead with it.” On the surface, that is an acceptance of responsibility but convention would dictate that the acceptance of Ministerial Responsibility is expressed through a resignation. In this regard, Donohue did not truly accept responsibility, although this convention has been (understandably) moved away from in recent years.

But who can blame him? It would not be reasonable to expect the Minister to have direct oversight for everything going on in their Department. The Minister should not be criticised for the biscuit options in the breakroom of some office they are responsible for, but have likely never been to. Yet, the standing doctrine of public administration says they should be.

The reason for this is because of the civil service we inherited in Ireland from the UK. The model we use is one in which civil servants are permanent and hired based off merit, with the function of not creating policy but rather carrying it out. This doctrine (particularly the form part) was built largely on the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, and yes, that Trevelyan. No, not just that Trevelyan family, but that specific Trevelyan; C.E. Trevelyan. The civil service’s hiring process and the Famine being designed by the same man is a red flag that decades of policymakers seemed to have missed. In this regard, while unfair to hold individual ministers responsible for the failings of their Departments, it would be fair to hold policymakers collectively responsible for their failure to institute civil service reform.

Aside from the obvious issue of the Free State holding onto the British civil service’s structures (and civil servants), there is the more pressing matter of the absence of true accountability in the civil service.

This issue harks back to what was proposed by Woodrow Wilson prior to his presidency when he was an academic. In 1887, he published The Study of Administration outlining how he felt the civil service should be structured. Notably, this was at a time in which the role of the State was rapidly expanding which the rollout of infrastructure projects such as railways and the telegraph network. Through this lens, Wilson saw a distinction between the making of policy and the doing of policy. He said “broad plans of governmental action are not administrative; the detailed execution of such plans is administrative”. So the broad plan to support cycling is not administrative, but the paying €336k for a bike shelter is.

Herein lies the problem. As already outlined, convention would demand a ministerial resignation for failures in the civil service. This is in spite of there being a clear demarcation between the two sides of policy implementation. Simply put that means that Ministers would be required to take responsibility for a decision that not only was not made by them, but was made by someone who they did not appoint or hire.

The consequence of this is that failures of, what Wilson termed, ‘public administration’ can be continuously made with little to no accountability – specifically democratic accountability. Where there are inherent failures of policy, the policymakers are held accountable through elections. But yet, the other side of policy implementation – the administration of policy – holds no such mechanism. The public do not get to exercise any means of democratic accountability over one half of public policy.

The solution to this issue is actually what the Northcote-Trevelyan Report set out to fix. That report aimed to solve the issue of people being given civil service jobs that they were unqualified for, often solely due to nepotism. Their solution was a permanent civil service with hiring made more independently from politicians. Given the increased role of the State today, there still remains a significant need for that exact structure, to preserve institutional knowledge and experience.

However, the failing of the contemporary civil service is that it is entirely structured on these lines. If the implementation of public policy is to be truly democratic in nature, then it must have democratic accountability. Ergo a section of the civil service must exist as impermanent and expressly political. In other words; appointed by Ministers, either directly or indirectly, and go when the Minister goes. This then gives the public the mechanism to express dissatisfaction with the administrative side of public policy by voting out the Government. By contrast the current means by which the public can express dissatisfaction with the civil service is by complaining in the pub (if you’re there before 5pm you might find a civil servant to complain to), longingly waiting for some unknown civil servant to retire, not that they’ll ever know when that happens.

The creation of a political arm of the civil service is not without precedent. In fact, it’s not that such an arm would be created but rather expanded. Currently there is a small group of politically appointed civil servants called Ministerial Advisers. You could fit them all in one bus. Given their rarity it is not surprising that their impact on policy administration is minuscule if it exists at all, especially given their placement on the policymaking side of things. But the unique value of these civil servants is that, unlike the rest of them, they can be held accountable by the public through elections.

Of course, there is the issue that in the Irish electoral system, people vote for a person not a party, so the lines between an election and democratic accountability over politically appointed civil servants is somewhat tenuous. However, we are seeing that as time goes on, voters are becoming increasingly concerned with party affiliation. By extension, voters are increasingly voting for governments. It is only logical to then include the all important piece of governing that is the civil service as something that can be shaped in the polling booth.