The Government should consider appointing a Minister for Counting.
There are times when one would be forgiven for wondering if we are going forwards or backwards. There was a great hoo-hah recently when some of our universities had their world rankings demoted, but on drilling down a bit it appeared that the rankings depended not on the excellence of teaching or the excellence of graduates, but on the universities’ financial resources and the ratio of students to staff. I would accept that there may be linkages between financial resources, staff ratios and levels of excellence, but I would reckon that they should not be, and are not, the only determinants. I also accept that education by its very nature is, and must be, flexible, that educational standards change and changing times require different emphases.
As a child growing up in Co Limerick, I can remember people in their 20s and 30s, who had left school following completion of their primary education not only being extremely literate and numerate but having a good smattering of geography, history and Irish and also being able to quote Latin and Shakespeare. When they moved into second level, it was French and Greek and science. Times have moved on and modern languages and technologies have displaced subjects like Latin and Greek, but you would wonder how much our educational system is being dumbed down and how much of the basic 3Rs are being taught in our primary and secondary schools. Well, it looks as if maths mightn’t be too high on the list of priorities either there or in our universities and colleges in view of the fact that the Department of Finance, which must presumably be staffed by highly educated people, has been encountering such numeracy problems.
Now, I’ve occasionally made an error of a €100 or so in adding up my own income and outgoings, but I find it difficult to understand that the Department of Finance could miscount to the extent that they “lost” or “overlooked” €3.6 billion in our national accounts, despite being tipped off about it by the National Treasury Management Agency. But, I suppose we shouldn’t be too concerned, because I understand that our paymasters, the mandarins in the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank missed it also! And I was under the impression that they were the people who were overseeing our books and teaching us to count – and I bet they had posh calculators and weren’t relying on their fingers, like we used to when we were at school. However, you would wonder if the Department of Finance, the IMF and the ECB missed that, how much else they might be missing and is it on the credit or the debit size.
Are our sovereign debt and our bank debt as bad as we think they are or are they worse? Are we really spending billions much more than we are taking in or perchance are we spending even more? How sure are they that our GDP and GNP figures are even fairly accurate? And what about all that cash that they hand out every year to the other Government departments and the HSE. Are they giving them the odd million too much or too little? Or even more worryingly, do they know how much they are giving them and/or how much they are spending and do the agencies which get the money know how much they are getting? Then what about all those grants and subsidies being handed out – does all the money go out, or does too much go out? But most interestingly there’s all that lovely bailout money being so generously given to us by the IMF and the ECB. Do the IMF and the ECB know how much they are giving us, do they know what we are spending it on, do we know how much we are getting and what we are spending it on?
Then who is working out the interest repayments and are they able to add, subtract or more importantly multiply and divide? It might be a good idea of the Government established a special Minister for Counting, whose job would be to go around all the Government departments and agencies, searching in drawers and files, in biscuit tins and learned tomes, behind chairs and couches, in rubbish bins and cupboards, behind paintings and under rugs to see if she could find some cash which had been overlooked and forgotten when the money was being counted. She – and I would suggest a woman, as women are much better at finding money – could begin in the Department of Finance and work on from there. When she was finished with the state agencies she could pay a visit to our banks and see what she could pick up there.
And if she was very good at her job, perhaps we could second her to the IMF and then the ECB and after that she could give the Greeks a dig out while she was at it. I am also wondering what would happen to the rest of us, if we were similarly numerically challenged? How understanding would our bank manager be, how sympathetic would we find the Revenue Commissioners, if we confessed we couldn’t pay up because we had made a little error in calculating our incomes and were now a little short?
