Ship of Fools

by Fintan O'Toole

  Yet, as far as the Irish educational system was concerned, none of this had really happened. In 1980, an optional computer studies module was included in the Leaving Certificate mathematics syllabus. It was ‘intended that this would be a first step in the development of computer studies in the post-primary curriculum’. Another optional course for junior cycle students was introduced in 1985. And that was that. As a Department of Education report acknowledged in 2008, ‘neither of the computer studies courses has been revised since their introduction, nor has there been any further development of computer studies courses, as such, as part of the curriculum in either the junior or the senior cycle.’

  As far as the Irish educational curriculum was concerned, it was still 1980. Computers were huge, mysterious, overheated machines with flashing lights held in vast rooms where boffins in white coats fed them with punch cards and ticker tape. Spooky Doctor Who-type music played in the background, barely drowning out the clicks and whirrs. Internet cafes, Second Life, Halo 3 and illegal downloads were science fiction. It was an educational variant on Life on Mars without the car chases or the postmodern irony.

  Nowhere was the smugness, indolence and incompetence of Irish governments more obvious than in the yawning chasm between the rhetoric of a high-tech, cutting edge, innovative society and the reality its education system scarcely bothered to acknowledge. The rhetoric was fine: as early as 1999, the government’s Information Society Action Plan declared that ‘If we are to maintain and build on our economic success of recent years, and ensure that all of society can participate in the Information Society, it is vital that Ireland becomes both an early mover and a global player in the Information Society. Failure to take action could mean that much of the strong economic performance of recent years could be lost.’ There was, in the abstract, a consensus that Irish prosperity could not be sustained unless the presence of so many world-class IT companies was used to create a culture in which technological and scientific innovation did not have to be imported.

  That knowledge of what had to happen failed to compute. Free-market ideology, the property craze and the stubborn attachment of middle-class aspirations to essentially nineteenth-century patterns combined to ensure that there was no transformation.

  In April 2002, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, signed the preface to a report published by his department called the New Connections Action Plan. He told the nation that the impact of IT on governance was ‘bringing about the single most dynamic shift in the public policy environment in the history of the state’. He told us that ‘The development of e-government is also central to shaping how we evolve as an information society . . . Given its key infrastructural significance, progress with e-government is increasingly seen internationally as . . . a key determinant of national competitiveness.’

  ‘Key’, ‘central’, ‘single most dynamic’ - this is the language of absolute priorities. A marker was being set down: judge us by how we deal with this stuff. If you actually read the report that followed, however, you would have felt immediately uneasy. It was awash with the kind of jargon and management-speak that is the infallible sign of a chancer: ‘there is growing acceptance of the need for a greater internal e-government focus on streamlining background processes, facilitating cross-organisational collaboration, continuing to develop an organisational culture with a user-centric focus, and achieving the full benefits from the substantial investments in technology across the public service. ’ People who know what they’re doing don’t take refuge in this kind of babble.

  And, of course, Bertie and his mandarins were bluffing. Setting up a special cabinet committee on the information society, boasting about our ‘global leadership position’ in high-tech industry and putting e- before every noun that had the misfortune to crawl across a screen were just masks for cluelessness.

  Here is a brief summary of just some of the big IT projects sponsored by the government in the Celtic Tiger years.

  MediaLab Europe was established by Bertie Ahern as a ‘flagship project’. It got €35 million of public money and the state also leased it, for a nominal rent, property that had cost €22.5 million. After four years, an outside review found that its progress towards meeting its objectives of cutting edge high-tech innovation ‘appeared to be zero or very close to it’. It was liquidated in 2005.

  The Department of Social and Family Affairs set up a computerised Client Identity Service (CIS) in 2000 to manage the PPS number registration system. It didn’t recognise ‘foreign’ names so anyone foolish to have one could be allocated a PPS number that was already in use. Fraudulently obtained PPS numbers could not be deleted, flagged or rendered unusable. More than one PPS number could be allocated to the same person on the same day.

  The HRMS computer system installed in the prison service in 2004 was so useless that it was completely abandoned a few months later, though not until after €340,000 had been spent on software licences and €175,000 on consultants.

  In 2002, the Department of the Environment ordered 6,315 electronic voting machines at a cost of €51 million. They were tried out in a few constituencies, but proved to be dangerously insecure. Simply keeping them in storage cost close to €1 million a year, until they were finally scrapped in 2009. Not even Florida would take them.

  The introduction of penalty points for dangerous driving in October 2002 saved lives. But the positive effect gradually faded as it became clear to drivers that the Garda did not have a computer system that could handle the work. Ireland’s ‘global leadership position’ in IT meant that the police were keeping the records by writing them down in ledgers like Dickensian clerks.

  The Garda PULSE computer system, which cost €61 million, was so bad that in many cases gardaí again reverted to writing charge sheets by hand.

  In public health administration, use of both the Personnel, Payroll and Related Systems (PPARS) scheme, which has cost €180 million so far in spite of an initial budget of €8.8 million, and the FISP financial information system, which had cost at least €30 million, had to be suspended in 2006, since neither of them could do the job it was supposed to do.

  A computerised integrated ticketing system for Dublin’s various modes of public transport was first announced by the government in November 2000. At the time of writing, the most optimistic expectations were that it might happen at the end of 2009.

  As for e-government, a 2008 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General found that although an estimated €420 million (not including the very considerable cost of internal staff) had been spent on developing online services between 2000 and 2005, Ireland had completely failed to become a world leader in the field: ‘While Ireland has some on-line transaction services that compare favourably with what has been achieved elsewhere, an EU-wide benchmark survey indicates that it has achieved the highest level of on-line service in only ten of 22 key public services for individual and business users . . . Overall, Ireland’s position is around the average for EU member states and some states are delivering a significantly higher level of on-line service.’ For an economy that needed to be at the cutting edge, being average was a significant failure.

  All of this points to an obvious conclusion - that almost no one in government, and relatively few in the civil service, had any real understanding of information technology. When it came to discussing either IT or science in general, ministers could generally do no more than parrot the gobbledygook they had been fed by consultants and advisers. When in December 2008, Mary Coughlan, Minister for Enterprise, set up an EFG on the implementation of the SSTI (that is, an Enterprise Feedback Group on the government’s Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation), it was not easy to be optimistic about the government’s plan ‘for Ireland to become a world-class knowledge economy by 2013’.

  The bullshit factor was most evident in two areas - broadband and education.

  Broadband was one of the very few areas in which the government had a very clear goal, to be achieved within a very specifi
c time-frame. In March 2002, Bertie Ahern’s New Connections document stated that ‘Government wants to see the widespread availability of open-access, affordable, always-on broadband infrastructure and services for businesses and citizens throughout the state within three years . . . We wish to see Ireland within the top decile of OECD countries for broadband connectivity within three years.’ This could hardly have been clearer - by March 2005, Ireland would be one of the top ten countries in the developed world. Broadband would be reasonably cheap and it would be available throughout the state. Ireland would also become the first European country to have video-quality broadband speeds (5 Mbps or higher) widely available.

  This was a fairly tough task to achieve in three years, but getting it done was both necessary and possible. It was an absolute necessity because otherwise all the talk about being on the leading edge of global technology was just so much waffle. It was possible because other small, geographically peripheral countries like Finland, Iceland, Denmark and South Korea were managing it. Indeed, it was precisely small, peripheral countries that had most to gain.

  And, fortunately, the government had the vehicle with which to achieve its goals: the state telecommunications company Eircom, which owned the telephone infrastructure. Or rather, it used to have. For in one of the most breathtaking follies of the Celtic Tiger era, the government had flogged off Eircom precisely at the time when it was setting its goals of making Ireland a world-leading information society. For purely ideological reasons, the state sold off its controlling majority stake in Eircom in 1999 for €4.1 billion. Hence the small, scarcely noticed caveat after the announcement in 2002 that Ireland would be one of the ten most connected societies in the world: ‘The state’s role in this area is confined to provision of seed capital.’ Ireland’s IT miracle was to be a purely private affair. The market would miraculously provide the cheap, universal service that was a key goal of national strategy.

  The privatisation of Eircom was a fiasco almost from the start. It was an attempt to whip up the fervour for ‘popular capitalism’ that Margaret Thatcher had generated in the UK in the 1980s. It worked: 575,000 people bought shares in the initial public offering. Two and a half years later, almost all of them had lost 30 per cent of their investment when the company was sold off to American venture capitalists (the Valentia consortium) and taken off the stock exchange.

  This was just the prelude to a long-running farce as Eircom was passed around among global venture capitalists like a joint at a student party. Each one inhaled the assets before passing it on. Having been taken off the market in 2001 by the Valentia consortium, it floated again in 2004, and was then acquired by Australian bank Babcock Brown in 2006. At each stage, Eircom was loaded with the debt borrowed in order to acquire it - it had debts of €3.4 billion at the end of 2008. In 2009, Eircom was up for sale again, this time to a Singapore-based consortium, setting up its fifth change of ownership in under ten years. In this game of pass-the-parcel, the only object has been to squeeze as much short-term profit out of the company as possible. Long-term investment of the kind needed to create a world-class IT infrastructure has been the last thing on anyone’s mind.

  This whole process was very good for a small number of people. It didn’t take long for popular capitalism to revert to the good old-fashioned unpopular variety. The members of the Valentia consortium who swooped on Eircom in 2001 made fortunes without doing much beyond loading it with debt. Tony O’Reilly made a clear profit of €35 million; the George Soros Fund raked in €177 million and Providence Equity made €443 million. The employee share ownership trust, which had leveraged trade union power into an astonishingly lucrative deal for its members, made €177 million. In total, on this one change of ownership alone, there were profits of nearly a billion euro. This was money that should have been invested in creating the promised broadband infrastructure.

  Needless to say, with the main player in the Irish fixed-line telecommunications market too busy servicing the needs of global venture capitalists, Ireland did not become one of the top ten countries in this field in 2005. Or in any year thereafter. It became instead a place where most people were deeply grateful for a 1 Mb connection and a third of the country had no access to broadband at all.

  As of December 2008, Ireland was twenty-first of thirty OECD countries for the number of broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, twenty-fifth for the geographical penetration of broadband services and thirty-first of thirty-five for the average advertised download speed. The fastest speed available from the main operator (Eircom) was the fourth slowest in the OECD - over twelve times slower than in France or Finland. As for the goal of being the first country in Europe to have widely available 5 Mbps broadband, the reality is that Ireland may well be the last.

  This failure had its roots in ideologically induced stupidity. The €4.1 billion it would have cost the state to directly provide a 5 Mbps service for most of the country was less than the €6 billion that the National Pension Reserve Fund, into which the money from the sale of Eircom was put, lost on international stock exchanges in 2008. But it was more important to pursue the delusion that the market would provide vital national infrastructure than to actually achieve a crucial transformation.

  Beyond this idiocy, however, there was a larger question of cultural change. Could Ireland, which had an abundance of creativity in the arts, develop a similarly strong technological imagination? Could the kind of leading-edge technological know-how that had been imported with transnational corporations become an organic aspect of Irish culture? The key to this obviously lay in education. But the government had better things to spend its technology budgets on, like useless e-voting machines and prestige IT projects that couldn’t even crunch the fabulous numbers of euros they were costing.

  Some of this stuff was very simple: giving kids access to computers in schools, for example. There is one computer for every nine pupils in Irish primary schools and one for every seven in secondary schools; the leading countries have a ratio of one to three or four. Even this makes things look better than they are. A third of the stock of computers in primary schools, and a fifth at post-primary level, is more than six years old and ‘not capable of running much modern software’. Most schools at every level don’t have a sufficient budget to maintain the computers and digital equipment they do have, so much of it is out of order much of the time.

  In England, two-thirds of primary schools and almost all secondary schools use interactive whiteboards in the classroom; the figures in Ireland are 5 per cent and 2 per cent respectively. Fewer than a third of Irish primary teachers, and a quarter of secondary teachers, rate their own ability to use IT in the classroom as ‘intermediate’ or above. Department of Education inspectors saw IT being used in just 22 per cent of lessons in primary schools and rated the use of IT in the classroom as ‘competent or optimal’ in just a quarter of cases.

  Not surprisingly, the levels of accomplishment in computer skills are quite low. The inspectors noted that ‘many fifth-class students in primary schools do not have the competence to complete basic tasks on the computer. While most students reported being able to perform many of the most basic computer tasks, such as turning a computer on and off and opening or saving a file, more than 30 per cent reported that they were not able to print a document or to go on the internet by themselves. Almost half reported not being able to create a document by themselves.’ Eighty-eight per cent did not know how to send an attachment with an email. And even after five years of post-primary education, most students were found to need help with tasks like moving files or sending e-mails.

  Given all of this, it is hardly mysterious that Ireland failed completely to create a culture in which science and technology are really valued. Just 16 per cent of students took higher level mathematics in the Leaving Certificate in 2009, just 10 per cent sat higher level chemistry and just 8 per cent attempted higher level physics. Interest in maths seems to have actually declined during the high-tech boom years. In
1992, when the higher level syllabus was introduced, it was expected that 20 to 25 per cent of students would take the exam. In 2001, the figure was 18 per cent. By 2009, it was 16 per cent. In 2005, the Department of Education’s chief examiner complained of ‘a noticeable slippage, over a short period of time, in both the quality of work and the capacity of candidates to engage with problems that were not of a routine nature’. If maths is the language of the twenty-first century knowledge economy, the Irish were becoming steadily less articulate.

  This was not some kind of genetic quirk. Ireland was perfectly capable of producing world-class mathematics graduates and of turning maths-based technologies into world-class companies. One of them, Havok, spun out of a Trinity College Dublin campus company and later bought by Intel for $100 million, is probably the global leader in the application of physics to video games and movies, powering the effects in everything from Halo and Guitar Hero to The Matrix and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But the appalling state of broadband development and the small numbers of maths graduates made it difficult for such companies to remain in Ireland. Havok’s managing director David O’Meara warned in April 2009 that ‘the Irish education system is at best only average by Western standards and is not producing the calibre of graduate we want in quality and quantity . . . You would think that the development centre for the next generation of Havok’s software would be in Dublin. But 10 years into the company’s history and we are looking at other major development centres, where we have operations, in Munich and San Francisco.’

  Behind this disastrous failure to create a sustainable and indigenous high-tech culture were two big questions. What do you want to be? And what do you do with your money? Weirdly, the answer to both questions was to be found, not in the globalised Ireland of the Celtic Tiger years but in the nineteenth century. The profound conservatism of Irish society meant that in crucial ways fundamental attitudes had remained frozen throughout a period of apparently total change. Because Ireland had ‘imported’ its development rather than going through a complete process of democratic modernisation, impulses from another era continued to have a shaping influence on Irish society.