Why Mary Lou McDonald should listen to Dominic Cummings

Policy and implementation are ultimately matters of personnel

In my column in The Currency today I explore a significant obstacle to Sinn Féin’s plans for fundamental change in Ireland: the permanent government.

I argue that party leader Mary Lou McDonald should pay attention to the views of Dominic Cummings on reform of the British state in making her plans for power:

Cummings is right that contemporary bureaucracies are not designed to manage modern political economies.

Having tried and failed to reform the British state, he is clear-eyed about where power lies, and how this is misunderstood in public debate.

He wrote recently that the coverage of politics hugely overstates the importance of ministers and the Cabinet, while largely ignoring the enormous power of the most senior officials.

During a decade in three different governments, I was perplexed at this tendency of political journalism to focus on surface phenomena and not the real exercise of power.

Basic facts about who exercises power are ignored, hindering substantive debate about reform of government.

The yielding of power over macroeconomic policy to the EU and corporate tax sovereignty to the OECD makes it even more important for the Irish State to excel in the domains for which it still retains responsibility.

Just as Cummings’ route to transforming the state ran through the Whitehall dominions of the Treasury and No.10, the Irish state can only be reformed from the centre out.”

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