The Big Con

VITAL LINK Collooney Station, the end point of the proposed Western Rail Corridor, pictured in 1993. Pic: Ben Brooksbank/geograph.ie/cc-by-sa/2.0


John Bradley

The title of a recently published book by Prof Mariana Mazzucato and Dr Rosie Collington – experts on the interface between public and private sector activities – is very revealing: ‘The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies’.
A disturbing feature increasingly common to public-sector activities is that analysis and strategising is frequently farmed out to private consultancy firms. For large-scale projects the pool of such firms is small. Conflicts of interest undoubtedly arise when a member of the select group of consultancies (EY, Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, Arup, etc) find themselves working for opposing sides of a policy issue at different times. Claims that ‘Chinese Walls’ preserve client confidentiality ring hollow. Massive growth in consultancy contracts, underlying conflicts of interest and lack of transparency have become serious matters.
The justification made for hiring consultants in public policy areas draws by analogy on the need for consultants in areas such as medicine, where there is a hierarchy of specialist knowledge and expertise within the medical profession, starting with the GP and progressing to the need for specific expertise when a particular illness is diagnosed. But, unlike business consultancies, the medical profession is tightly regulated and strict oversight seeks to ensure that advice and treatment are sound and unbiased.

Internal skills
As Mazzucato and Collington point out, governments initially hired consultants to fill gaps in their own specialist expertise. But with pressures to cut taxes and shrink the size of government, the ‘contracting out’ approach has come to dominate public-sector decision making. These days the private sector often claims to be more trustworthy than the public sector, and more competent. The end result is that government agencies are deprived of opportunities to develop the internal skills needed to diagnose and address newly emerging challenges.
And even where these skills exist, excessive reliance on private consultancy firms often prompts public-sector staff to transfer to better-paid jobs with consultants. This can ‘infantilise’ the staff who remain, and when a consultant’s report eventually lands on their desk, the commissioning state agency may even lack the ability to evaluate it rigorously.
The more governments outsource, the less they know how to do, causing them to become hollowed out and dependent.

Consequences and casualties
Readers will recall that I myself have severely criticised the consultancy group EY for their flawed and sloppy report, costing the Government €300,000, which asserted, incorrectly, that there was absolutely no business case for restoring the Western Rail Corridor (WRC) link from Athenry to Claremorris.
Readers will also recall that I have asked in vain for an explanation as to why the €100,000 EY report on an economic strategy for Co Mayo, commissioned in 2019 by Mayo County Council, has never seen the light of day.
The Northern & Western region is not the only casualty of The Big Con. The frustrating delays in publishing the results of the all-island rail review commissioned by the Irish and Northern Irish governments in 2021 and carried out by consultants Arup, a British multinational firm headquartered in London, is yet another example of The Big Con in action. One suspects that the two island of Ireland rail enterprises know far more about all-island rail strategy than Arup.
I understand that the Arup report is complete, but due to an extraordinary lack of political common sense by our government, it cannot be published without agreement by the government of Northern Ireland. It was an oversight on the part of our government not to see this coming. Or did they even care? The NI Executive has ceased functioning in the past and a bit of foresight would have been useful.

Ceding control
Recently, Leitrim County Council, partnering with Sligo, Cavan and Fermanagh and Omagh, announced that they wanted to develop the Sligo Leitrim Northern Counties Railway (SLNCR) Greenway. Arup has been selected to advise them.
Much of the rail system involved in this proposed enterprise is situated north or west of Sligo and is in a similar state of dilapidation and abandonment as was the old Westport-Achill line that now forms the basis of the highly popular Great Western Greenway. But it also embraces an element of the track from Claremorris to Sligo – a vital final link in the restoration of the WRC, running from Bellaghy (on the Mayo-Sligo border) to Collooney. The counties’ democratically elected councils, in co-operation with their executives, as well as the N&W Regional Assembly should drive this matter. Not Arup.
Back in 2021, when we in West-on-Track set out to examine the flawed analysis of the EY report on the WRC, an application was made seeking unpublished background information to their analysis under the Freedom of Information Act. We were shocked to discover that information from EY could only be made available with the agreement of EY, which was not forthcoming.
This meant that only work carried out within the Department of Transport itself could be made available to us, consisting of various draft EY reports and, amazingly, an internal review by the Department itself that identified many inadequacies in the EY work. None of the inadequacies identified by the Department appeared to have been corrected in the published EY report!
Mazzucato and Collington would interpret this as a clever way of suppressing controversial analysis by interposing a private consultancy firm that can refuse permission on the grounds of commercial confidentiality. What do you think?

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.