Sinn Féin’s chilling warning to mandarins
SINN Féin has sent a chilling warning to the country’s top civil servants – warning they must face ‘consequences’ for their advice.
It comes as the party’s housing spokesman, Eoin Ó Broin, launched a scathing attack on one of the State’s most senior mandarins.
Mr Ó Broin hit out at advice given by John McCarthy, one of the more influential fiscal advisors within the Department of Finance and a key member of the Tax Strategy Group which defines the
Government’s fiscal agenda, in relation to the housing crisis.
In a briefing note to Department of Finance Secretary General John Hogan prior to the publication of the Government’s Housing for All plan, Mr McCarthy said pumping more money into the market risked adding inflationary pressure on the sector.
The correspondence – revealed in our sister paper, the Irish Daily Mail – also revealed a reluctance to commit more funding to housing until issues around planning density, planning appeals, building height and regulations are addressed.
Mr McCarthy is regarded as a fiscal ‘hawk’ who is deeply uneasy over the exponential increases in public spending and is believed to be a strong influence on Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe.
However, Mr Ó Broin claimed the civil servant ‘knows nothing about housing’, adding: ‘He should not be dealing with issues such as this’. He told the Mail on Sunday: ‘He [McCarthy] is very evangelical on this issue. He keeps on saying we shouldn’t be throwing money at housing. We contend there is a far greater social and human cost in homelessness.’
The Dublin Mid-West TD added there ‘should be consequences’ for senior mandarins who provide ‘bad advice’.
The Department declined to respond to a request for comment on the comments.
Mr Ó Broin’s positioning follows a series of recent highprofile controversies involving senior civil servants.
These include the furore over Department of Health Secretary General Robert Watt’s €81,000 pay rise, which was also the subject of a heated pub encounter between the country’s top paid civil servant and Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien.
Former Secretary General of the
Department of Foreign Affairs and now Ambassador to France, Niall Burgess, came under fire over his central role in the ‘champagne-gate’ controversy after he tweeted a picture of staff socialising while the country was under strict lockdown rules.
Sinn Féin did not respond to queries from the MoS asking if the party is considering a cull of senior civil servants if it is voted into power.
However, one party source told the MoS: ‘If you have a party that wants change and a ruling caste of mandarins who do not want this change then you have a problem.’
Tensions over crises over the actions of some senior civil servants have also accelerated within Government.
One minister warned: ‘Patience is running out and not just in Sinn Féin. It was once the case that civil servants were supposed to keep rogue politicians in check. Now politicians are needed to keep the civil servants in check.
‘Our mandarins appear to enjoy an unofficial version of qualified immunity.
‘We have a housing policy that is in a permanent state of collapse, a health service that is a study in dysfunction, a climate change policy that is only fit to irritate the public and which is already falling by the wayside.
‘We have had tribunals into agriculture, planning, policing, the meat industry, the HSE and just about every human activity you can think of. Our mandarins even sleepwalked the country into bankruptcy and a half decade of austerity.
‘Throughout all this not a single mandarin has been sacked. It would be easier to defrock a cardinal than move a mandarin.’
Over the last four decades there has not been a case where a secretary general has been dismissed or sanctioned.
Former Fianna Fáil and now Independent TD Marc McSharry plans to introduce a Private Members Bill to create a disciplinary body for secretary generals.
The Sligo-Leitrim TD said: ‘There is no-one to discipline the secretary generals outside of the nuclear button of a Cabinet decision. They are freer from accountability than the judiciary.
‘We need to create the disciplinary equivalent of the Top-Level Appointments Commission for discipline.’
In 2015 the Government did attempt to impose greater accountability for top mandarins when then Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin set up the Civil Service Accountability Board (CSAB).
The membership of the CSAB included then Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, Tánaiste Joan Burton, Finance Minister Michael Noonan, Mr Howlin, and the country’s two most powerful civil servants at the time, Mr Watt and Martin Fraser.
Although the existence of the CSAB is referred to in Government documentation from 2019, after four meetings across 2015 and 2016 and the production of a 12-page report in 2016, the watchdog, which was never officially disbanded, ceased to operate.