PADRAIG O hUIGINN

Padraig O hUiginn was one of the most prominent civil servants in recent Irish history. He spent five decades in the public sector before retirement in 1993, rising to serve as secretary general of the Department of an Taoiseach between 1982 and his retirement in 1993. There he played a prominent role in development of the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) in Dublin’s Docklands in the late 1980s. In Ireland Inc, O hUiginn is quoted as saying that the problem with the Irish banking system over the past few decades was its inefficiency.

“The banking system was staffed by people who came in at the bottom of the rung a bit like the civil service — they had no real capacity; they just learned the business, they just knew the money came in and came out.” He believes that the recruitment process across the Irish banking system has to be reviewed.

He is also very critical of the 2008 State guarantee of the banking system, saying the government should have gone to the EU Commission and European Central Bank before introducing the wide-ranging guarantee that eventually undermined the sovereignty of the State, he says.

“They should have gone to Europe the next day and said ‘We have a problem and it’s your problem’. By the time they did go to Europe, the guarantee was already in place so it was too late.”

O hUiginn also said he would like to see a major reform to the institutions of government. “We have 15 government departments in a population of 4.4 million, and there are 15 sub-ministries and sub-departments and I am quite sure this is not necessary. I said this to Leo Varadkar before he became minister [for health, at the time]. I said you could run an empire with 15 government departments and he said the British did it with seven.”

He is perhaps best remembered for his close working relationship with the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, who, he says, was a complex person with many different facets to his personality.

“He had that ability to make decisions: he was a different politician. Johnny Ronan [the property developer] tried to buy his estate, and he said to me it was terrible negotiating with Haughey. I said to him: “You forget you’re negotiating with three people — he was a politician, a lawyer and an accountant. You rarely meet that. ‘Jesus’, he said, ‘that’s what it was’. But when I would have one argument Haughey would come up with another.”