Wasters

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Prologue

On a drizzly grey November afternoon in 2008, sipping coffee out of paper cups in the Insomnia Café across the road from FÁS headquarters on Upper Baggot Street in Dublin, we watched the comings and goings of the staff at Ireland’s semi-state training and employment agency. The employees, shuffling in and out of the grim concrete building, looked like beaten dockets. Morale at the agency was low, and no wonder: it had been receiving some unwelcome media attention, following a series of probes by the Comptroller & Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee into advertising and promotion spending overruns. There was a whiff of scandal in the air – a whiff that was soon to grow into the stench of rotting waste.

We eyed the building opposite and plotted our response in case any last-minute obstacles were placed in our way. It had taken months to prise open the doors of the FÁS fortress. No late stunts would have surprised us.

When the time came, we walked across Baggot Street, spoke to the receptionist and were met by the head of the Freedom of Information Unit, Michael Bowden. He escorted us into the creaky lift and up to the fifth floor.

Inside, FÁS headquarters was a depressingly poky place. An organization with an annual budget of nearly €1 billion, which we had reason to believe had been spending lavishly on the pleasures of its top brass, it was evidently doing little to provide comfort for the staff who endured the daily slog. We passed a series of small rooms: employees poked out their heads from behind dark corners to gawk at us.

At the end of a narrow, wood-panelled corridor, Michael ushered us into a room that overlooked the office car park. He introduced us to a young woman who was there to ensure we did not steal any of the documents we had come to inspect.

Our Freedom of Information Act request, which we had put together after receiving a tip-off from a trusted anonymous source, had sought ‘all the details of the cost of travel, accommodation, etc., incurred by FÁS personnel and directors’, as well as their spouses, on a visit to Florida in connection with the FÁS Science Challenge, a project that was intended to open doors to careers in science, technology and engineering. The Florida branch of the Science Challenge brought a small number of Irish students every year to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Florida Space Institute.

We never dreamed of the scale of the paperwork that our inquiry would throw up. A large table was piled high with row upon row of documents covering the transatlantic trips – and much more. The credit-card statements and receipts relating to our FOI query also contained fascinating details about spending in other areas by FÁS chief Rody Molloy, Corporate Affairs boss Greg Craig and other executives.

Michael showed us the files, asked politely if we would list the documents we wanted photocopied and left us under the supervision of his colleague. She buried herself in a novel as we waded into the mountains of paper in front of us.

After five minutes we knew we had hit the motherlode. We didn’t say anything to each other. We didn’t need to.

After we’d been sifting through the documents for a while, the door opened. In walked big John Cahill, the manager of the Science Challenge programme. We had not been expecting him.

In that small room with the table covered by stacks of documents, we asked him a few questions about expenses and he told us about his ‘passion’ for the Science Challenge. When we pieced it all together, we saw that his ‘passion’ had cost the taxpayer €124,000 in travel to the US, South Africa and Japan.

We had been stalking FÁS for years – and for years FÁS officials had been fighting to keep us off their backs. Even in the distant nineties, chief executive John Lynch (now head of CIÉ) had complained to the top management of Independent Newspapers about the adverse coverage FÁS had received in the Sunday Independent business pages. Lynch was at a loss to see how a newspaper group that was closely involved in sponsoring FÁS’s ‘Opportunities’ jobs fair could publish material critical of a colleague in a joint venture.

The same attitude persisted after Lynch departed from the agency. FÁS, with its massive advertising budget, constantly flexed its muscles in the media to ensure soft coverage. Significantly, the Comptroller & Auditor General’s report in 2008 criticized FÁS for placing advertisements in print that ‘did not appear to be conducive to the attainment of value for money’. When Greg Craig was asked about his practice of directly placing ads himself, rather than leaving this task to the agency’s advertising firm, he referred to how ‘the ability to be seen to have a media spend could potentially influence how FÁS was portrayed in the newspaper or magazine in question.’

FÁS expected good publicity, and FÁS usually got it. The powerful employment agency used advertising as the stick to beat media bosses, and it used junkets as the carrot to keep the hacks happy. Politicians too were well looked after. Employment schemes were placed in politically sensitive locations and local political warlords were allowed to take the credit.

After a hard-hitting article in the Sunday Independent in 1996, letters of protest about the wonderful work of FÁS were sent to the editor; they had the tone of an orchestrated campaign. Well-directed invitations to visit FÁS centres, including disability projects, kept arriving.

After several years of sustained probing of the FÁS finances, we started to receive anonymous letters, from a single source, alleging serious malpractices in the agency. Initially they pinpointed slovenly training practices and cronyism. Later they alleged massive waste. We checked up on each one. Nearly all were independently confirmed by other sources.

After a while we had built up a formidable dossier from our anonymous source. We were certain we knew the identity of our informant and rang him, but he refused to confirm that it was he or to speak to us face to face. Even to this day we are in little doubt that we know who was feeding us the information, but we have never had a conversation with him on that basis.

One of the anonymous letters had allowed us to publish an embarrassing report about the utterly chaotic state of training at the agency, but we lacked the hard evidence we needed to confirm our deep suspicions about FÁS’s culture of waste.

In the tiny room on the fifth floor, on that November day in 2008, the hard evidence was staring us in the face.

During the summer of that year, our anonymous informant had directed us to seek information about the antics of the FÁS bosses’ jaunts to the US as part of the FÁS Science Challenge programme. It suggested that we would need to use the Freedom of Information Act. The Act had been – up to that stage – a bit of a waste of time. When it was introduced in 1998, there had been a splurge of journalists lashing in all kinds of requests for files and government documents. Most of the time they got back piles of photocopied documents with black lines obliterating the text; the information had been ‘redacted’ by civil servants hiding behind those provisions in the Act that prevented the release of ‘sensitive’ information. There had been some successes: we now know how much Bertie Ahern spent on make-up during his time in office. But most of the information that had come out was less than spectacular. We weren’t hugely confident that using the Act would produce anything valuable.

The FÁS Freedom of Information Department left its response till the last legal minute to give us an answer. We weren’t surprised – delay was a FÁS trademark. But when the answer finally came back, we were pleasantly surprised: the response was ‘Yes’. The information would be released.

There was a slight catch. FÁS said that it would cost nearly a thousand euro to prepare the information for our inspection. We saw this as a play for a delay and told FÁS that the cheque was on its way – which seemed to surprise them.

Soon after that, they changed their minds. The charge would be only four hundred euro. The FÁS bluff had been called. We wondered about the reduction in price, but concluded that they had expected us to back off once we had been quoted the initial amount. When we didn’t, we reckoned, they began to fear that we would expose them for ripping us off over a relatively simple search.

We dispatched the cheque. A few weeks later, having heard nothing from FÁS, we contacted them to find out why they had failed to acknowledge it. We were told it had never arrived.

We found the failure of the cheque to travel the few hundred yards from Kildare Street to Baggot Street a trifle curious. After complaining to An Post, we dispatched another one. The second cheque landed. (The first one turned up a few days later.) The papers were released and FÁS made arrangements to allow us to inspect them.

The dazzling array of receipts we were shown on that day covered the travel-related expense claims of FÁS chief executive Rody Molloy and his wife, of FÁS chairman and IMPACT trade-union chief Peter McLoone and a host of FÁS senior managers. We did not know where to start. We sat at opposite ends of the table and began to work our way through the thirty-odd cardboard boxes on the table and the floor, filling notepads. Nick Webb spotted one receipt for $410 attached to a claim form with just the word ‘presentation’ scribbled on it. The receipt was from a place called Solutions in West Cocoa Beach, Florida. When Nick returned to the Sunday Independent offices, he googled Solutions and found a mention in a local directory: it wasn’t a high-tech company doing research on space exploration, but a beauty parlour and nail salon. The bill was for none other than former Tánaiste Mary Harney, who had had responsibility for FÁS in her capacity as Minister for Enterprise between 1997 and 2004. She – and at least one other member of the travelling party – had arranged to have their hair styled and blow-dried at their Florida hotel by hairdressers from the salon.

Was that gem more sensational than the €900 tip in a top Dublin restaurant, or the $942 for Rody Molloy’s round of golf? We knew that the documents in the room spelled the end of the road for Molloy. They raised serious questions for the board, for Mary Harney and for the Taoiseach.

When we left later that afternoon, Michael Bowden took a list of the papers we wanted to photocopy. He told us that he would like to inform Rody Molloy ‘out of courtesy’.

As we left the premises, we spotted top-dollar public-relations spinner Jim Milton of Murray Consultants in the foyer. Milton was a troubleshooter, often called in by commercial outfits in deep doo-doo. His services did not come cheap, and his presence in the foyer that afternoon suggested that FÁS already knew it was experiencing major difficulties. In any case, whatever fees Jim charged to dig the board and executives out of a hole would be paid for by taxpayers, the same victims who had been stung for the cost of the Florida junkets. Almost two years later we discovered that Murray Consultants had bagged a €54,000 fee from FÁS.

In the days before we published our exposé, we telephoned several top FÁS officials about the story. They failed to respond. But we were aware that calls had been made to the highest level in the Sunday Independent, trying to get our story spiked or delayed. We guessed that if there had been a delay of even one week, FÁS would have been able to feed the information to friendly hacks in other newspapers or media groups, who might have downplayed the story and ultimately buried it. Despite the influence of FÁS as a key advertiser, our bosses did not yield to the pressure.

Two days after the story broke, Molloy was gone. The public now knew that FÁS was a cesspool of waste and political cronyism.

1. The Rise of the Semi-States

The phone rang at the Sunday Independent business desk; the voice at the other end of the line was a cabinet minister’s. ‘A bit of news for you,’ the Fianna Fáiler whispered to Shane Ross. ‘Two slots on the Aer Rianta board have been filled. One for Bertie and one for Mary.’

It was November 1997, a Friday afternoon – a point in the week when exclusive news is precious to journalists.

‘Dermot O’Leary is Bertie’s. Tadhg O’Donoghue is Mary’s,’ confided the caller. Albert Reynolds’s man, Noel Hanlon, remained in the chair and Charlie Haughey’s pal, Noel Fox, was still on the board.

‘Board meetings at Aer Rianta will not take too long’ the Fianna Fáiler quipped. The minister was a good source, and we happily published the story two days later.

The reappointment of Dermot O’Leary to the state airport authority was stunning. A Fianna Fáil loyalist on the semi-state directors’ circuit, he had created untold bother a year earlier as chairman of CIÉ. Originally an apostle of Albert Reynolds, he had left the semi-state transport monopoly after a spat with Michael Lowry, the short-lived Fine Gael Minister for Transport, who had raised questions about O’Leary’s proposed sale of a CIÉ property in Cork to the developer Owen O’Callaghan. Lowry had announced an inquiry into the sale, alleging a sweetheart deal and accusing O’Leary of disbanding the CIÉ property subcommittee in order to hasten the transaction. O’Leary denied the allegations, stating that the plan had been brought to him, as chairman of CIÉ, by top executives. (In the end O’Callaghan pulled out of the deal.)

O’Leary was not a man to be tackled lightly. Word in political circles was that the Fianna Fáil diehard – who had launched a legal action against Lowry – was now too hot to handle, and that Bertie Ahern’s new government was quietly grateful to Lowry for removing him from the pitch. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, O’Leary would vanish quietly from the Aer Rianta board when his time was up. So it came as a great surprise when his directorship was renewed – and at the insistence, according to our source, of the Taoiseach.

O’Leary was a member of Fianna Fáil’s national executive and a former chairman of its Dublin South Central Comhairle Ceantair. His business, Crane Hire Ltd, had made him a millionaire. He was a typically brash, flashy specimen of the new Fianna Fáil, who liked fast cars, loud clothes and first-class travel.

After O’Leary’s less than glorious exit from the CIÉ chair, the Sunday Independent reported that his successor, Eamon Walsh, believed that O’Leary had made trips to South Africa and Australia that had yielded not ‘one bit of value’ to CIÉ. O’Leary strongly defended his travels as CIÉ chairman after Lowry used Dáil privilege to quote Walsh’s comments, thereby fuelling the allegations of misuse of public funds.

O’Leary’s ten-year spell on the board of Aer Rianta was marked by a series of controversies. On one occasion when his friend Liam Lawlor was flying home from the United States to face a spell in Mountjoy Prison, O’Leary made a telephone call that enabled the disgraced TD to avoid the waiting press corps by slipping through a special exit at Dublin Airport. O’Leary successfully resisted calls for his resignation following this incident, probably because of his impeccable Fianna Fáil connections.

He was one of five recipients of a €9,000 Cartier watch that the departing Aer Rianta directors awarded to themselves when their terms ended in 2003. After the controversy surrounding the taxpayer-funded gifts broke, the red-faced directors returned the watches – except for O’Leary, who said he would pay for his.

The bizarre gift had been organized by the airport authority’s chairman Noel Hanlon, a member of the cosy quartet of Fianna Fáil loyalists on the Aer Rianta board. Hanlon had run a successful ambulance business before it went into voluntary liquidation in 1988. Since then he had been hopping from one state board to another, mostly courtesy of fellow Longford man Albert Reynolds. As early as 1982 he had been made chairman of the state rescue agency, Foir Teoranta, followed by a spell as a director of Aer Lingus. To his credit, he frequently refused to accept director’s fees at his semi-state fiefdoms.

Hanlon saw himself as a hands-on chairman at all his posts. As chairman of the VHI he became embroiled in a row about whether he or the chief executive was in charge. At Aer Rianta too he fiercely defended his patch, never yielding an inch to those who threatened his monopoly, winning a series of turf wars and keeping the competition at bay. He successfully opposed the efforts of the entrepreneurial McEvaddy brothers, Ulick and Des, to build a second terminal at Dublin Airport. He tried to quash the emergence of another rival when Aer Rianta sought a judicial review of a decision to allow a rival car park at the same airport. In the process he delayed the emergence of the cheaper competitor, John O’Sullivan’s Quickpark, by several years.

Hanlon had an office and a big Merc out at Aer Rianta’s headquarters and took any threat to its dominant position personally. He hated Ryanair, believing that the upstart airline had disturbed the status quo in the aviation industry. After years of jousting about landing charges and the number of passengers Ryanair could bring to Dublin Airport, Hanlon went in front of an Oireachtas committee in 1999 to accuse Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary of telling ‘blatant lies’ when he promised to bring one million extra passengers to Aer Rianta and then delivered only 179,000. O’Leary – who had been a long-standing thorn in the side of Hanlon’s board at Aer Rianta, frequently denouncing the authority’s monopoly – threatened to sue.

After ten years at the helm of Aer Rianta, Hanlon’s loyalty to the airport empire he had defended began to take precedence over his party allegiance. He had always managed to keep on the right side of Fianna Fáil ministers by personally attending to their needs. Cabinet members travelling through Dublin Airport were regularly seen off at the tarmac by the chairman. Despite his dependence on Albert Reynolds, he managed to maintain excellent relations with Mary O’Rourke, Reynolds’s internal party foe, when she was given the transport portfolio in 1997.

This cosiness with Fianna Fáil politicians ended suddenly in 2003, when the new Minister for Transport, Séamus Brennan, decided to break up Aer Rianta into separate companies, to be based at Cork, Shannon and Dublin airports. Hanlon and his board resisted Brennan’s plans to the last, joining forces with the trade unions and using all their Fianna Fáil clout to frustrate the minister. Due to Hanlon’s manoeuvres, Brennan found himself obstructed by Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy and finally – to Hanlon’s delight – demoted by Bertie Ahern to the department of Social and Family Affairs.

Hanlon was joined in his resistance to this split of the empire by Tadhg O’Donoghue, a fellow Fianna Fáiler on the board and another semi-state veteran. O’Donoghue, according to our cabinet source, was Mary O’Rourke’s choice for the board in 1997. He had been a senior partner in the giant accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and carried the urbane sophistication generally associated with the highest echelons of that profession. In 2000 O’Rourke made him chairman of the ESB, an important semi-state post that even the most tribal Fianna Fáil ministers had always awarded to commercially competent businessmen. O’Donoghue met that criterion, but, as former Fianna Fáil director of elections for Dún Laoghaire, he passed the tribal loyalty test too.

O’Donoghue had filled an Aer Rianta vacancy left by an obscure board member named Pat Moylan. Moylan’s story fits a familiar pattern. He hails from Offaly, and was a key figure in the local organization of Brian Cowen TD, destined to become Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach. Cowen, who served as Minister for Transport in 1993–4, appointed him to the board of Aer Rianta days before the Fianna Fáil–Labour government left office in 1994. Moylan had little, if any, experience of aviation. A farmer, with Cowen’s help he was elected to Seanad Éireann on the Agricultural Panel in 1997, necessitating his immediate resignation from Aer Rianta. Today Moylan is Cowen’s eyes and ears in the Seanad, and the Taoiseach’s support helped him to sail into the position of Cathaoirleach of the Upper House. The post carries a salary of approximately €110,000 per annum.

Moylan’s appointment to Aer Rianta was only one of ten made by Cowen in the eleventh hour of his dying ministry in 1994. Another was the elevation of Fianna Fáil fundraiser Jim Lacey to the chair at the Irish Aviation Authority soon after he quit as chief executive of National Irish Bank; he would resign the post in 1998 on foot of revelations about practices at the bank.

The last of the Fianna Fáil quartet in the Aer Rianta board’s class of 1997 was Noel Fox. Fox had been appointed to several state boards by Charlie Haughey from as early as the seventies. Like Hanlon, he was also a director of the VHI. He starred in the McCracken Tribunal’s investigation into payments to Haughey and to Michael Lowry, emerging as a link between Haughey’s crooked bagman Des Traynor and supermarket supremo Ben Dunne: while Traynor was touting for money for the former Taoiseach, Fox – a senior partner in accountancy firm Oliver Freaney – was the conduit between Dunne, Traynor and Haughey. Both Fox and Freaneys were censured by a later accountants’ inquiry, finding that Fox was effectively carrying out management functions at Dunnes while Freaneys was auditing the same company’s books.

The Aer Rianta board of 1997, with four Fianna Fáil cronies among its eight members, was the one that took Ireland’s airport authority into the third millennium. It was a far cry from the ideals of the founders of the semi-state companies. Aer Rianta had been created under the leadership of Seán Lemass; but by 1997 it was the creature of Haughey, Reynolds, Ahern and Cowen.

Lemass, had he lived to see it, would have been horrified at what became of his semi-state legacy. In a few short decades the companies set up to assist the fledgling state in vital areas of national economic interest had become playthings for the new rich. Aer Rianta was only one example of this decline.

Lemass was Minister for Industry and Commerce when Aer Rianta was set up in 1937. Lemass’s first chairman of Aer Rianta was a legendary civil servant, John Leydon. Leydon was no political patsy. When Lemass asked him to become Secretary of the Department of Industry and Commerce after the creation of the first Fianna Fáil government in 1932, he is said to have accepted the post, but only conditionally. He warned Lemass that he was no ‘yes man’ and that he was unhappy about certain of his policies. The minister replied that Leydon need have no fears, that his opinions would not be an obstacle to his progress. Lemass was true to his word, and eventually made Leydon chairman of Aer Rianta and Aer Lingus.

In a paper delivered to the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) in March 1959 – three months before he became Taoiseach – Lemass spelled out the rationale behind the semi-states. He wasn’t a socialist with a blind belief in state ownership; rather, he was a pragmatist. Semi-state enterprises had been formed where private enterprise had feared to tread. If private capital would not take a long-term view, the state would step in with more patient investment. Lemass applauded the profit motive, but where national policy demanded it, he had set up semi-state companies.

Lemass outlined in the IPA paper the compelling reasons why the state provided capital for the establishment of the ESB (1927), the Industrial Credit Company (1933), The Irish Sugar Company (1933), Aer Lingus (1936), Aer Rianta (1937), Irish Shipping (1941), CIÉ (1944/50), Bord na Móna (1946) and other companies. According to Lemass, the reasons were always strategic necessity, self-sufficiency and jobs. He saw the new companies not only as vital to meet social needs, but also as dynamic engines of the economy.

There is a danger that after the initial drive, to set up a new organisation and to get it functioning properly, has expended itself the organisation may settle down to routine operations characterised by excessive caution and loss of initiative and flexibility. There is the danger that in the course of time these organisations may be directed and administered with decreasing regard for the national needs and increasing and undue concern for the benefit and convenience of their staffs. There is a danger that bureaucratic procedures may stifle efficiency and delay necessary or desirable innovations and changes.

Wow. Was he anticipating the overmanning at Telecom Éireann or the ESB, the featherbedding of the staffs at Aer Lingus or the chronic inefficiencies at Aer Rianta? Could he have imagined the Employment Share Ownership Trusts, the shares gifted to employees just before the semi-states were launched on to the stock exchanges? Is this what he meant by the ‘decreasing regard for the national needs and increasing and undue concern for the benefit and convenience of their staffs’? The words are uncannily prophetic of the decay to come.

The father of Ireland’s semi-state enterprises went on to warn of the necessity for constant vigilance:

In most instances in the case of these organisations, there is, apart from the spirit of public service, no automatic spur to efficiency. They lack the stimulus of private enterprise and competition. When it is possible that every rise in costs can be offset by higher charges, the danger is more acute and the need for some means to ensure continuing efficiency becomes clearer. The State-sponsored boards, if they are to fulfil their proper role in the national economy, require to be kept under continuous pressure, from inside and outside, to revise their procedures and costs in a continuous effort to maintain their efficiency.

In recent years the profligacy in semi-state bodies such as FÁS, CIÉ, the Health Service Executive (HSE), An Post and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) has demonstrated that Lemass’s warnings weren’t heeded.

Even as Lemass delivered his paper to the IPA in 1959, a bill setting up An Cheard Chomhairle (ANCO), the training agency that later became FÁS, was before the Dáil. Lemass had a clear vision of the importance of apprenticeship for the economy. ANCO was established as a lean, purposeful outfit. What would its creator think of FÁS, the bloated monster it had begotten, destined to become the shame of the state sector?

Lemass ended his paper by giving himself a pat on the back: ‘By and large,’ he declared, ‘State boards and companies have been successful by every test and their contribution to the national economy has been a very important factor in the nation’s growth.’

Perhaps he was right in 1959. Certainly the next speaker in the debate that day would have heartily endorsed the minister’s favourable verdict on his own creation. C. S. ‘Todd’ Andrews, the colossus of the semi-states, rose to reply to Lemass. He insisted that ‘without these companies the country would be little better than a cattle ranch’ and went on to describe state companies as ‘my interest and my life’.

It was probably understandable that Andrews should be more starry-eyed than Lemass about the semi-state enterprises. Having fought in the War of Independence and on the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, he then worked for the Irish Tourist Association – later Bord Fáilte – and the fledgling ESB before Fianna Fáil took power in 1932 and appointed him to develop Ireland’s turf industry. Later he moved from the bogs to the railways, taking charge at CIÉ in 1958.

Andrews’s autobiography, Man of No Property, reveals a love of the unlovable semi-states unmatched in modern times. At one point he describes himself grandly as being not only a ‘Jeffersonian democrat but a socialist’ who ‘regarded the semi-state industries as socialism in its practical form’. Lemass would have shunned such labels. He would happily have lived with the later privatizations of semi-state companies on a case-by-case basis, while Andrews would probably have opposed them on principle.

Todd Andrews’s insights into the early days of the ESB are priceless. He describes the workforce as ‘messianic in its enthusiasm’ and insists: ‘There were no labour problems. Hours worked counted for nothing with the technical or administrative staff.’ He reveals that ‘when emergencies occurred … total co-operation at all levels was assured. Even some members of the board chipped in.’ He recalls seeing William Fay, a member of the board during the thirties, dressed like a skier, helping to restore the high-voltage lines in Kildare. It is hard to imagine the chairman of today’s ESB, Lochlann Quinn, or his predecessor, Tadhg O’Donoghue, up an ESB pole in a storm. Writing in 1982, Andrews described the ESB as ‘the finest industrial organisation in the country’, citing its rural electrification scheme as evidence.

Andrews notes that in the early days of the state each side in the Civil War had promoted its own comrades. The anti-Treaty side – which would become Fianna Fáil – initially regarded the civil service as ‘a crowd of Free State bastards’. After Fianna Fáil took power, he was exasperated by the nakedly political opposition of Cumann na nGaedheal to the development of the Irish bogs. As a result of this opposition, the Turf Development Board was politicized – and Andrews played the ‘jobs for the boys’ game pretty unapologetically himself. After receiving the nod from Lemass, he asked Robert Barton, a celebrated republican, to chair the Turf Development Board. Barton combined competence in the agriculture area with political acceptability.

Andrews goes on to admit that ‘later at my request two other part-time members, both friends of mine … were added to the board.’

‘Friends of mine’? The phrase was meant as an endorsement, a revealing justification of their appointment. The author’s message is clear: if they were friends of his, they were, ipso facto, fine as directors.

When Andrews sought an accountant for the Turf Development Board, he looked no further than his ‘intimate friend’ Dermot Lawlor. Andrews said he ‘persuaded him to apply for the accountant’s post … to which he was duly appointed’. If that were to happen at executive level at Bord na Móna today, there would probably be political outrage; but then Dermot Lawlor’s competence was never in question, unlike that of the party hacks stuffed on semi-state boards today.

Andrews served in Bord na Móna for twenty-five years. With an endearing lack of modesty, he claims that he was eager to leave in 1956, ‘but I was identified so publicly with Bord na Móna and it was reflecting such credit on the government that their reluctance to sever my connection with the board was understandable’. Lemass eventually asked him to transfer his talents to the chair at CIÉ in 1958. According to Andrews, the minister’s only problem was the ‘difficulty that would arise in replacing me in Bord na Móna’.

Andrews hesitated because of his doubts about the proposed composition of the board. He took one look at CIÉ and decided that he needed to be both chairman and chief executive, and later wrote that ‘a crash operation was needed which could not be successfully carried out unless … the chairman was chief executive; an operation of this kind required the virtually complete authority of one man.’ (Such thinking is still alive and well at CIÉ, where the current supremo, John Lynch, combines the roles of chairman and chief executive – contrary to corporate-governance best practice.)

Writing in 1982, Andrews was outspoken on the boards of semi-states, noting that their members ‘are given their appointment for a variety of reasons’.

The commonest of these is that they have participated in or supported the activities of the political party in power, but frequently because they have subscribed heavily to political funds. Some are appointed because they are friends of particular ministers or TDs. A trade unionist is usually appointed for cosmetic reasons. From time to time an academic is appointed to provide intellectual cachet or to reflect some cultural interest on the part of the minister concerned. Sometimes the statutes require that the government makes the appointment, sometimes a particular minister. It is not important. No appointment is ever made without the agreement of the Taoiseach and the government whatever the statutes say.

Andrews’s experience had led him to believe that an appointment to a semi-state board should be seen as an honour, and that directors should ideally not be paid. He tells us approvingly that the first directors of the Turf Development Board worked without payment and did so ‘with enthusiasm and success’.

His views on retired civil servants sitting on semi-state boards were uncompromising, believing that those who had served in a department that had supervised the semi-state body should be excluded and calling such appointments a ‘depreciation of the currency of public life’. He also judged it ‘bad in principle that the secretary of the Department of Finance should automatically become chairman or a member of the board of the Central Bank’ – a tradition that, with regard to the chair, remained virtually unbroken until 2009, when Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan appointed an academic economist, Patrick Honohan, as Central Bank Governor. By that time, of course, the damage caused by the unhealthily close relationship between the Department of Finance and the Regulator had already been done.

Andrews viewed the directors of semi-state bodies as instruments of government policy. ‘The basic function of the board of a state-sponsored body is to ensure that the chief executive is carrying out the policy of the government as laid down by statutes … they “direct” nothing.’ What would he have thought of the Aer Rianta quartet of Noel Hanlon, Dermot O’Leary, Tadhg O’Donoghue and Freda Hayes (a Fianna Fáil supporter who had replaced Noel Fox in 2001) when, in 2003, they defiantly opposed transport minister Séamus Brennan’s policy of breaking up the airport monopoly? He would probably have sacked Hanlon as chairman on the spot. Brennan contemplated the dismissal route, but Hanlon’s Fianna Fáil connections were strong enough to stymie this. Aer Rianta had become the board’s, not the state’s, possession. Eventually government policy was implemented, though not before Brennan was humiliated.

Andrews’s tenure at CIÉ was more difficult than his years with Bord na Móna, but his reorganization of the moribund transport body bore fruit. The 1958 Transport Act had given the transport company an annual subvention of £1.75 million; after that, it was expected to wash its face.

Andrews ruthlessly shut down railway routes – most controversially, the Harcourt Street line between Dublin and Bray – in his quest to break even, and by 1961 CIÉ was within a quarter of a million pounds of achieving this. But after nearly achieving solvency in 1961, CIÉ’s fortunes fell into decline. Cursed by intransigent unions, expensive wage settlements and inefficiencies, it made bigger and bigger losses. Andrews retired from CIÉ in 1966, on his sixty-fifth birthday. Today, CIÉ makes losses of over €300 million a year, which are covered largely by a subvention from the taxpayer, and its name is synonymous with waste, cronyism and inefficiency.

Andrews’s retirement from CIÉ should have marked the finish of his career as a public servant, but there was one semi-state left for his attention. His old patron Seán Lemass – now at the very end of his tenure as Taoiseach – offered him the job of part-time chairman of the RTÉ Authority. Andrews accepted but – in his typically puritan style – declined the offer of an office, a secretary and a chauffeur-driven car. Luxuries and perks were beginning to creep into the remuneration packages of semi-state chiefs, but he felt the enjoyment of such rewards by a part-time chairman could not be justified.

His tales of RTÉ Authority meetings do his colleagues of the day little credit. He asserts that the authority usually said ‘yes’ to the director-general’s proposals, partly because ‘some of the members never went to the trouble to read the supporting documentation and discreetly remained silent’. Many only opened their mouths when it came to discussing specific TV programmes. No meetings of the authority went beyond lunchtime because ‘post-prandial meetings have many evident demerits’. Lunch appears to have been the main item of the day for some RTÉ bosses.

Andrews had been appointed because he was a safe pair of hands. He had succeeded his namesake Eamonn Andrews (no relation), the best known of a growing band of Irish-bred broadcasters who had achieved success in Britain at the BBC and at ABC Television. Eamonn had resigned as chairman, partly because of what he saw as RTÉ’s excessive use of the Irish language and partly because of the state broadcaster’s reluctance to employ foreigners. Eamonn’s status as a celebrity chairman, meanwhile, had not suited Fianna Fáil.

Todd Andrews, by contrast, wanted more, not less, of the Irish language on the airwaves and was far more in tune with the nationalist mood of the day than Eamonn, the Irishman who had won so many accolades as the star Irish broadcaster in the United Kingdom. The government took advantage of Eamonn’s departure to tighten its grip on RTÉ.

Todd Andrews relates how the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Erskine Childers, would relay cabinet grouses about RTÉ to him every Thursday. He says that he ignored nearly all of Childers’s gripes, but there is little doubt that the government could rely on him to act in what they perceived as the national interest. After all, he had been a Fianna Fáil supporter all his life. Although his membership of the party had ended when he joined the civil service in 1933, he had been an undisguised Fianna Fáil ‘sleeper’ in the semi-states ever since. Yet by the time he retired for the last time in 1970 his infatuation with Fianna Fáil was fading.

Andrews makes a fleeting but significant reference in his autobiography to an ominous development in the Irish political world of the sixties. A Fianna Fáil fundraising organization called ‘Taca’ (the Irish word for ‘support’) had sprung up in November 1966. It involved businessmen and Fianna Fáil in a mutual back scratching exercise that hardly put the nation first – and that, for Andrews, ‘diminished further any emotional interest’ he had in the party.

His resignation was not unrelated to Taca’s leading personalities and associated activities. By his own account, he resigned because his son David became chief whip of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party and he did not wish to be faced with any conflicts of interest. Significantly, David Andrews had been appointed because of vacancies created by the fall of some of the best-known Taca enthusiasts: Charles Haughey, Neil Blaney and Kevin Boland had been sacked or resigned from the cabinet as a result of events leading up to the famous Arms Trial. The way was cleared for a fightback within Fianna Fáil by the opponents of the dubious activities of Taca.

While Andrews and Lemass had soldiered together in the IRA and in the semi-states, the next generation of their republican families parted ways. Lemass’s son-in-law, Charles Haughey, led the wing of the party that cultivated the brash type of businessman typified by Taca. Andrews’s son David, meanwhile, opposed the Haughey/Blaney/Boland wing of Fianna Fáil to the hilt. The party’s former unity of purpose, seen as patriotism by Andrews and Lemass, did not survive into the succeeding generation. Haughey and many of his Fianna Fáil followers were mesmerized by the benefits politics could offer in terms of material wealth, and this ethos ultimately gained the ascendant in the party.

Lemass had been succeeded as Taoiseach by Jack Lynch in 1966. The new Taoiseach was hardly a wet week in office when Taca was born. The departure of Lemass, a strong man of integrity with Civil War roots, gave the green light to the brash mohair-suit brigade of Haughey, Blaney, Donogh O’Malley, et al. Their desire to plug Fianna Fáil into the business community was indulged by Lynch in a way that Lemass would never have tolerated.

Taca’s methods were a sea change from the church-gate collections for the party in the era of de Valera and Lemass. The new industrialists, builders, bankers and architects of the sixties were approached with requests for donations of £100 a year to become members of this secretive organization. Members paid £100 a head for dinners in the Gresham and the Burlington, where they hobnobbed with ministers. Its activities attracted the interest of maybe as many as 500 businessmen and a lot of adverse media comment, with the opposition insisting that ‘Tacateers’ were buying favours from the government.

Taca was a two-way street. Some members were already in key business positions but saw membership as a means of influencing Fianna Fáil government policy. Others used it to secure prestigious posts in state bodies. The chairman of Taca was a high-flying surveyor named Desmond MacGreevy. His careful cultivation of political contacts won him valuable contracts, including the huge flats complex at Ballymun in North Dublin. MacGreevy was a friend of both Haughey and Donogh O’Malley – whom he succeeded as chairman of the national Building Advisory Council. When it was merged with the semi-state An Foras Forbartha (the National Institute for Physical Planning and Construction Research), he became a director. He secured a multitude of state contracts including the Central Bank headquarters in Dame Street, the expansion of RTÉ at Montrose, the engineering and agricultural faculties at Belfield, the new Dublin Airport Hotel, the National Currency Centre at Sandyford, and the Ireland Houses in London and Brussels.

Taca caused deep divisions within the party. George Colley, a leading member of the traditional wing, was understood to be talking about Haughey when he gave a celebrated speech in 1967 in which he deplored ‘low standards in high places’, but some also detected a swipe at Taca; and the following year he declared that ‘under no circumstances can we allow big business to dominate Fianna Fáil’. Two years later, dogged by bad press, Taca was disbanded. But the love affair between Fianna Fáil and big business lived on; and party supporters continued to receive preferment in state appointments.

Wasters

Contents

Prologue

1. The Rise of the Semi-States