Quangos - Anybody Got a Match?

Now that the dust is settling on the Budget we are beginning to see some of its gaping holes, despite all the good work done by Brian Lenihan in stabilising our precarious situation. And of all these holes, none is bigger than the complete absence of any mention of quangos.

The so-called 'bonfire of the quangos' has been promised from the moment the credit crunch really hit home, with those of us who had always chafed at the massive waste of public money that these unelected and unaccountable bodies represented, now being joined by most reasonable people.

With the attention of the public suddenly focused on this massive diversion of taxpayers' funds, the Government seemed to realise the game was up on their little racket, and quickly started making noises about doing away with the multitude of quangos created under Bertie Ahern's plan to buy everyone and everything in sight with our money.

However, a year later one could be forgiven for thinking every quango had been done away with, and the billions squandered on them had all been recouped, if Lenihan's speech was anything to go by. But no, the 800 (a guess) or so quangos are still merrily spending money like it's going out of fashion, and countless 'chief executives', 'directors', and 'chairpersons' are still occupying their expensive office suites around the country and issuing spending directives and press releases as if they were Eva Peron.

But of course, we were all being a bit naive if we believed any politician would willingly relinquish his right to nominate certain well-connected people to a public body that had been specially dreamt up just for them. Especially when it was all being done at the taxpayers' expense. Don't we all remember how Bertie Ahern appointed his ex-girlfriend to the Consumer Agency, even though she had precisely zero experience in any of the issues she would be sitting in judgement on? But nobody cared. The important thing was that politicians had found the most wonderful little scam whereby they could lash out political patronage to their willing stooges, while bribing potential enemies, all at our expense. But what's a €200,000 salary between friends, even if we did have to hand it out thousands of times between quango bosses, managers, board members and staff.

Now that we are beginning to see that the most inexcusable part of the public sector is the one that has remained untouched, there is more than a little bafflement. Lenihan has a big enough battle on his hands with justifying cuts to pay and benefits for people on the edge of the financial abyss, so you can only admire his weird determination to fight to the last ditch to keep the apparatchiks and comrades in the Equality Authority at their expensive desks.

Maybe the Government knows more than they're saying, and they have a big surprise in store for us. Or more likely, all those in the inner circle who were so carefully featherbedded in their quangos by the politicians, know where the bodies are buried, and have made themselves "untouchable".