Serve the public? Not our public servants!

IT’S such a pity the 500 workers at the HP Inc plant in Leixlip have been so unceremoniously let go. At the stroke of a pen, the manufacturing base was earmarked for closure because demand for computer cartridges has crashed, throwing the lives of the workers and their families into turmoil, through absolutely no fault of their own.

That’s the harsh face of capitalism. The survival of the fittest means that the human cost hardly figures when captains of industry make haste to cut their losses and diversify into more profitable enterprises. It also means that even in thriving businesses, workers who don’t pull their weight get their marching orders and heads roll when targets are not met.

The rules are different in the public sector. There, survival is guaranteed in the job description and except for frontline workers, fitness or competence is beside the point.

The RTÉ documentary, Living On The List, showed the scale of heartbreak and pain, most of it avoidable, caused by endless waiting lists.

Yet not one manager in the country has taken responsibility for the situation in their hospital or received so much as a slap on the wrist.

Nobody is responsible for the sevenyear-old boy whose suffering was so cruelly prolonged because his name wasn’t put down for scoliosis treatment.

Even if the dangerous delay over a brain tumour operation could be pinned on a manager in Beaumont Hospital, the worst that could happen is their transfer to some other department while keeping their pay grade.

WHEN he was health minister, Leo Varadkar promised ‘heads rolling’ in an internal memo about overcrowding, only to admit subsequently that nobody could be sacked. The HSE has still failed to hold any staff to account for the scandal in Portlaoise hospital.

Health Minister Simon Harris has promised to hold managers to account over the growing patient waiting lists with latest figures showing that there are now 630,000 public patients on lists.

Either Harris is naive about the extent of his powers or he is guilty of cynically legitimising the public sector to which he incidentally belongs, by holding out false hope of accountability in the HSE.

The absence of sanctions and the power to dismiss staff for repeated failure seems to have robbed the HSE of the impetus to improve its performance.

Waiting lists are not the only black spot. The A&E crisis emerges like Groundhog Day every January. The new children’s hospital now seems but a pipe dream, and the true cost is €1bn – €300m more than originally estimated.

Who messed up the original costings, misled us about the affordability of a state-of-the-art children’s hospital and caused us to throw good money after bad? We will never know. The HSE is a microcosm of the disarray, the vested interests and the betrayal of the public interest that is replicated right across the public service.

The ASTI dispute about Junior Cert reform grinds on even as exam season approaches; the Garda Commissioner refuses to stand aside even temporarily for Judge Charleton to carry out his inquiry; the Government is still led by a lame-duck Taoiseach who couldn’t even persuade the Polish Prime Minister to back our special case over Brexit.

COMPUTER printers and ink supplies, like every manufactured goods, will come and go – but the public will still get ill, children need educating and law will be maintained. Public servants have something that is rare, and will be even more so in our post-Brexit, Trumpian world: a secure and relatively wellpaid job for life.

The pay-off for that privilege should be accountability, a dedication to good teaching, functioning hospitals, the fulfilment of the public service ideal.

But with some notable exceptions, what we have instead is a vast and entitled behemoth that serves itself before the public.