Over the past few months, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Jack Chambers has been voicing his concern at the poor record of public servants in delivering vital infrastructural projects and in policy implementation more broadly.
To inject urgency into the system he established the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce (AIT) including Sean O’Driscoll, who has an outstanding record of achievement in the private sector as former chairman of the Economic and Social Research Institute and former chairman and chief executive of Glen Dimplex.* Chambers also encouraged public servants to take more risks to get things done.
The last time I heard this much talk about the need to “enhance our risk appetite”, as it was put, was in the boardroom of one of the pillar banks in the period leading up to the banking crash of 2008. Spooked by the roaring success of Seán FitzPatrick’s swashbuckling Anglo Irish Bank and a growing unease that the upstart Anglo might attempt to purchase their long-standing respectable bank, the bank’s management loosened its lending criteria. And we all know how that ended.
With the closure of the National Asset Management Agency last week, it took 18 years to clean up the big financial mess, while leaving thousands of individual citizens scarred by the events of that time.
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The main shortcoming of our public servants is not that they lack the courage to take risks. What they lack is the necessary expertise. In 2008, as the banks were imploding, only a handful of people in the Department of Finance had diplomas in banking. The majority were generalists with arts and business studies degrees. Collectively, there was little knowledge of Irish banking and even less about the horrendously complex financial instruments and transactions that lay under the bonnet of the International Financial Services Centre, which was seen at the time the “wild west” of financial services by some US commentators.
Today, the Civil Service continues to lack necessary expertise, as set out in a recent article by Frances Ruane, who argued that the Civil Service needs more staff with deep expertise and specialist skills, as opposed to more generalists. Apart from some limited specialist recruitment in IT, HR and accountancy, “our public service model has broadly remained a generalist one”.
“What is the argument,” Ruane asked, “against recruiting people to specialist streams relevant to Government such as law, project management, logistics and climatology?”
The public service compensates for its technical shortcomings with seemingly unlimited recourse to expensive external consultants. But crucially, you need a core group of in-house experts in order to hire competent consultants and draw up sound contracts.
Against a background of costly failures and overruns from the notorious, failed large-scale public IT project implemented for the Irish health service, PPARS, to the national children’s hospital and the catalogue of jaw-dropping mishaps in the Office of Public Works, we learn that – to take just one example – the OPW is charged with developing the GPO as a cultural centre and other amenities at an estimated project cost of €200 million to €500 million.
Egging-on public servants who lack the necessary expertise to take more risks is ill-advised, to put it mildly.
Surprises, especially nasty ones, are eliminated by having detailed project plans with careful risk assessment and mitigation measures, together with a regime of tight monitoring of progress, external oversight and personal accountability for outcomes
Twenty years ago, while on an assignment in a multinational tech company, I witnessed how seriously they took their corporate values, one of which was a commitment to results. Each value had explanatory bullet-points and under ‘Results’ was the elaboration “we adequately resource all projects”.
That tech firm is one of several which have gone on to successfully deliver very large-scale projects.
The second pervasive Civil Service deficit that renders heightened risk-taking hazardous is the patchiness of managerial discipline across the system. In the private sector, management relies on disciplines and controls to prevent unexpected issues.
Management guru Peter Drucker summarised the role of management as being “to eliminate surprises”.
Surprises, especially nasty ones, are eliminated by having detailed project plans with careful risk assessment and mitigation measures, together with a regime of tight monitoring of progress, external oversight and personal accountability for outcomes. These planning, control and accountability processes, which are integral to private-sector managerial culture, are at odds with our political and administrative culture. That’s why O’Driscoll’s membership of the AIT is so important.
These basic management tools are even more important in the public sector because of the added complexity of projects requiring collaboration across multiple siloed agencies – as in the case of water services, services for vulnerable children or the development of Dublin city.
At the recent MacGill Summer School, Robert Watt – a former secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the Department of Health and now head of the project management unit of the Dublin Regeneration Authority – supported Chambers’s encouragement of more risk taking provided that, as he put it, we avoid a “culture of ‘gotcha’”.
“If we’re going to do things quickly and take risks, we have to have an acceptance that some things will go wrong. But we have to have a culture which learns from that as opposed to a culture which is about blame and pointing the finger,” he said.
“Gotchas” occur in the absence of basic management controls, whereby a problem festers, perhaps for years, until a whistleblower or investigative journalist pulls back the veil. We saw this in the South Kerry Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services when, a review found, hundreds of children received “risky” treatment from a doctor working in mental health and significant harm was caused to 46. Similarly, finger-pointing and blaming arise in the absence of clear structures of responsibility and accountability, as the futile scramble begins to find out who knew what, when, and what they did or didn’t do about it.
Watt described in his speech how he once almost persuaded then taoiseach Leo Varadkar to say he wanted to see more failure, though Varadkar baulked in the end.
We should be grateful Varadkar was more cautious than Watt would have liked – public servants do not need to be encouraged to “give it a lash” or “have a go” with the get-out-of-jail card of no recriminations if the project goes belly-up. Coming from one of the most influential public servants of the last decade, this advice is sheer folly.
Eddie Molloy is a management consultant
*This article was amended on August 11th 2026 to correct an error. The previous version incorrectly described Sean O’Driscoll is chair of the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce. The taskforce is chaired by Minister for Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform, Jack Chambers and O’Driscoll is a member
