John Collison: Government-by-Agency corner

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odyssey06

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An interesting article in the Irish Times from Stripe co-founder John Collison on what he calls the "constrained state" and the failures of "government by agency".
Really the whole article is worth reading, just providing this as an introduction:

Here are some specific projects Ireland fumbled: The Grid West transmission project, linking Dublin to the windy west, was shelved in 2017. Proposed nearly 30 years ago, the Water Supply Project, linking Dublin to the Shannon, still hasn’t entered planning. The Greater Dublin Drainage Project has entered its second judicial review, 20 years after it was first proposed. The Dart+ Tunnel, which would have facilitated hundreds of thousands of homes west of Dublin, was shelved in 2021...
Why can’t Ireland just do things? It’s not for want of money. For the past 10 years at least, we have had plenty of money. To be sure, investment did fall after the bailout, resulting in important projects being shelved, and a slow ramp-up thereafter. But in the grand scheme of the past 30 years, Ireland has been able to afford the projects it has needed...
Local opposition to development is not, by itself, the main bottleneck for projects in Ireland. If it were, we’d expect to see big protests against new projects or intense debate in council chambers. But we don’t. Instead, restrictions in the form of planning policies emerge from a mysterious process involving officials from local authorities, the Department of Housing and the Office of the Planning Regulator. This happens far from the public eye...
The third problem with government-by-agency is that the agencies can’t make trade-offs. If the pursuit of their goal blocks something else important – well, that’s not within their remit. So we have the state-funded An Taisce blocking the Galway ring road, the M3 motorway and the Shannon LNG scheme. We have officials at Fingal County Council throttling flights out of Dublin Airport. Inland Fisheries Ireland blocks flood remediation works. The Heritage Council is blocking the demolition of a wall for the N2 bypass. And then the combinatorial complexity between overlapping state bodies creates logjam. Irish Water, Waterways Ireland, ESB, EirGrid, and the EPA each have jurisdiction over different bits of the Shannon.

www.irishtimes.com

John Collison of Stripe: Ireland is going backwards. Here’s how to get it moving

The Stripe co-founder looks at how the State can get out of the government-by-agency corner into which it has painted itself
www.irishtimes.com www.irishtimes.com
 
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It is a good article but it is also contradictory in my opinion.

Collison advocates for politicians to be afforded and exert more power to by-pass the quangos. He cites that Ireland is a highly trusted country "I notice a common meme in Irish political discourse that our politics and government are corrupt. They are not. Ireland tends to come out near the very top of global anti-corruption measures, such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. It isn’t the 1980s any more. We can trust our leaders with more power and they should feel emboldened to use it to deliver for their citizens. We shouldn’t keep trying to hamstring them even more."

Possibly one of the reason's it is 'It isn’t the 1980s any more' is because Ministerial decisions are heavily influenced from outputs of these quangos that I assume are staffed by expertise in their respective fields?

This is the part I agree with;

"I have found that leadership often doesn’t mean setting grand, sweeping plans but instead resolving nuanced trade-offs between competing priorities. By creating a multitude of agencies each with specific remits, we’ve created a system that’s institutionally incapable of making trade-offs."

Overall, the salient point is the time taken to make decisive decisions particularly around significant infrastructure projects and there is more than an element of excessive oversight or excessive influence from bit-part players and their own legitimate interests.

Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick should have designations for planning that prioritise city development and city dwelling that can override specific concerns of other interests - with the final decision-making in cases of conflicting interests being at the door of the respective democratically elected leader.

Only, the potential to return to the 1980's, brown envelopes etc will eventually re-emerge.
 
It's an anti-environment rant.

Two hundred and twenty eight homes were blocked in Killarney because they would interrupt the commute of a roost of horseshoe bats. Who signed up for this?

We did. It's the European Habitats Directive. There is plenty of space to build new homes. They don't have to be built in places which will destroy the environment and threaten the survival of important species

So we have the state-funded An Taisce blocking the Galway ring road, the M3 motorway and the Shannon LNG scheme. We have officials at Fingal County Council throttling flights out of Dublin Airport. Inland Fisheries Ireland blocks flood remediation works. The Heritage Council is blocking the demolition of a wall for the N2 bypass.

An Taisce is blocking nothing. It makes its case to the relevant authority and the relevant authority applies the law.

He wants a government minister to have the power to just build a water supply from the Shannon to Dublin and sod the environment or the objectors. "the Water Supply Project, linking Dublin to the Shannon, still hasn’t entered planning."

Intel, Ireland’s flagship manufacturing tenant, picked Germany over Leixlip, Co Kildare, in part because of concerns over planning and electricity supply.

But that is partly due to the fact that we have built so many data centres.

When government ministers were in charge of planning they made decisions based on political expediency and occasionally as a result of bribes.

Despite its faults, I would much prefer to have An Bord Pleanála in charge, than Ray Burke, Jim Tully or Michael Lowry.

The Green Minister for the Environment did his very best to stop the incinerator being built in Ringsend although it was clearly necessary. It is a good job that the decision was not his to make. The local councillors at the outset voted for an incinerator for Dublin and then objected to every actual location.

Of course changes have to be made. Corrupt individuals have been able to blackmail developments by objecting to them although they are in no way impacted by them. But this has to be balanced with the citizen's right to object. Maybe the An Bord Pleanála decision should not be subject to judicial review? Or maybe those who go to the High Court would have to lodge a very large sum of money so that there is a cost to them if they fail.
 
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He is quite right to point out the huge number of regulator agencies that have appeared in the last few years.

In the past 25 years there’s been a proliferation of regulators, departments, agencies and NGOs. Since 2000 we’ve created 303 new government agencies, quangos or departments, compared to 74 in the prior 25 years.

We have moved to a nation of regulators. A lot of them should be done away with. But not all of them.
 
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There are four reasons it’s a bad idea to leave the running of the country to agencies and officials.

The first reason is that these agencies aren’t directly accountable to the public.

The second is that the agencies have values and goals of their own, and these values are sometimes out of step with the rest of the country.

The third problem with government-by-agency is that the agencies can’t make trade-offs.

The last problem with all this delegation is it makes people disillusioned about politics.

It's a bit like democracy. It's not a great system, but show me something better.

Interest rate setting has been taken from politicians and given to Central Banks in the eurozone, the UK and America. We are much better off as a result.

I would much prefer if the authority to set budget limits were taken from politicians and given to the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. The Minister for Finance should be told - "This is how much you can borrow and this is how much you can spend. If you want to spend more, then you will have to increase taxes." That would be a much better system that the completely irresponsible Minister for Finance which we have at the moment being criticise for not being irresponsible enough by the opposition.
 
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he may be right on some points (I don't know, I'm not reading it on principle) but it sticks in my throat to see billionaires given newspaper columns to lecture us about the government. This isn't the US, if he wants to stand for public office, there's an election in 4 years.
 
shweeney said:
it sticks in my throat to see billionaires given newspaper columns to lecture us about the government.
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I have to say that I am very interested in hearing the views of clever, successful people.

I don't have to agree with all they say. In fact, I don't have to agree with most of what they say. But they may well spark an interesting idea worth discussing.

shweeney said:
if he wants to stand for public office, there's an election in 4 years.
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The problem is that a lot of competent people would find it a very poor use of their time.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
We have moved to a nation of regulators. A lot of them should be done away with. But not all of them.
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That's broadly the point he was making. I don't think it's good for democracy to remove so much power from the people who are actually accountable to the people.

I also think that organisational incompetence is harder to fix than corruption. I'm beginning to think it's also more harmful. We've moved from building too many homes in the wrong place to not enough homes anywhere.
 
shweeney said:
what's the alternative, government by plutocrats? Billionaires having private meetings with ministers to push their agendas? He could certainly afford to run for office, and is a better use of his time just accumulating more billions?
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The less we pay politicians the more we make it the preserve of the rich.

Very few people who are very rich are driven by making more money. Their drive is to succeed, just like top footballers are more interested in medals than money and top musicians are more interested in artistic success than money. Asking why he keeps working and making more money is like asking why Rory McIlroy keeps playing golf and making more money. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates them.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
We have moved to a nation of regulators. A lot of them should be done away with. But not all of them.
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Everyone tends to see things through their own spectrum.

Thus, the ones that you'd like to see removed may not be the ones that I, or other citizens, would like to see removed.

So who will decide? The Government, the Unions, the Councillors, the powerful lobby groups, or the Courts?
 
Marsupial said:
Everyone tends to see things through their own spectrum.

Thus, the ones that you'd like to see removed may not be the ones that I, or other citizens, would like to see removed.
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And if everyone has a veto then nothing gets done. That's the problem.
Marsupial said:
So who will decide? The Government, the Unions, the Councillors, the powerful lobby groups, or the Courts?
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The Government. They, and only they, have a mandate from the people to legislate and to run the country. They shouldn't outsource it to lobby groups (unions are the most powerful lobby groups) and they shouldn't leave it to the courts to decide.
 
Purple said:
The Government. They, and only they, have a mandate from the people to legislate and to run the country. They shouldn't outsource it to lobby groups (unions are the most powerful lobby groups) and they shouldn't leave it to the courts to decide.
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When "The Government" implements and enforces the 1991 EU Nitrates Directive, instead of pleading for yet another derogation because it's afraid of the farming lobby, I'll agree with you.

Simple fact is that there's far more fudge in Leinster House than there is in Fortnum and Mason.

(I recall a Government deciding that the National Childrens' Hospital would be built in Phibsborough. How did that decision go?)
 
Marsupial said:
When "The Government" implements and enforces the 1991 EU Nitrates Directive, instead of pleading for yet another derogation because it's afraid of the farming lobby, I'll agree with you.
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Is that not a case of them outsourcing to lobby groups? In this case the Farmers.
 
Purple said:
Is that not a case of them outsourcing to lobby groups? In this case the Farmers.
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You can certainly argue that.

But I appear to have missed the Government's Press Release informing us that "The Cabinet has agreed that henceforth, national policy on fresh water will be determined by the IFA, rather than by the EU, the Minister for the Environment or the EPA."
 
Brendan Burgess said:
It's a bit like democracy. It's not a great system, but show me something better.
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Maybe it's not democracy that's the problem, but the Irish version of it. (I'm thinking of our multi seat constituency PR system, which almost guarantees weak governments). But - rather like Irish so-called neutrality - it's a subject that's virtually impossible to debate at a rational level.)

(Perhaps a topic best left to the hot air academic/political/journalist brigade at the McGill Summer School!)
 
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Marsupial said:
But I appear to have missed the Government's Press Release informing us that "The Cabinet has agreed that henceforth, national policy on fresh water will be determined by the IFA, rather than by the EU, the Minister for the Environment or the EPA."
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Why do you think a Press Release would be necessary? Formal transfers of power are not required.
 
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