Government giving away our pot of gold
It was noted back in January of this year that the government were closing their little visited and very useless website reachservices.ie.
The site was approved at a cost of €14,000,000 by a committee on eGovernment. It ended up costing €37,000,000 to build. It then had annual costs of €15,000,000 a year.
The local and European elections on 11 June 2004 should have been the dawn of a €50,000,000 e-Voting system. Instead due to the lack of public confidence on the back of an ICTE submission to the independent Commission on Electronic Voting which said the machines had a technical flaw the machines were shelved. Cost of this shelving is about €2,000,000 per year.
A small glass tuck shop on the grounds of Leinster House on Kildare Street was built between March 2007 and opened in January 2008. The bill for the 40Sq m glass house was €1,280,867.
Today (15 December 2008), it is reported that a senior manager in An Post was awarded a total of €106,000 for his 11 weeks work in 2007. Following a restructuring of An Post some employees who were surplus to requirements i.e. didn’t accept a move elsewhere, were moved to what is known as the “rubber room” or officially the resource centre. Here they had little or no work to do but still qualified for full pay and bonus.
These are of course just some of the many, many examples of waste in the public sector. The idea of reform of any sort in the public sector seems to be the least of the governments priorities. Due to bad management and a lack of willingness we are finding ourselves living in a country which costs €50billion a year to run. €20Billion covers the wages in the public sector alone. There is surely some fat that can be trimmed off and some wiser choices that can be made. There better be because so far this year the government has pulled in only €40billion in taxes and that is why we need to borrow, borrow and borrow some more.
