“Sharing a home with family members as an adult is very different to doing so as a child”.
Over the past forty-eight hours, much has been said and written about the video which contains that insightful quote, and which can be seen below, at the end of this paragraph. The defence of the video mounted by the Department of Housing, which published the offending footage, is that the video wasn’t theirs at all, but was put together by two other taxpayer-funded bodies, Spunout dot ie, and the Housing Agency. What nobody, I think, has said, is that taxpayer money should not be spent to make statements of the bleedin’ obvious:
One of the things we do not talk about in Ireland nearly as much as we should is the difference between delivery, and activity.
The state is excellent at activity: It spends tens of billions of our euros on it every year, across the public sector. Much of this money – far too much – is spent on things that are not directly productive. A good example here would be the money expended by nearly every agency of the state on continuing professional development courses for staff, or in-house agencies coming up with new HR policies, or the endless reports and reviews and consultations carried out by government departments. Or, of course, the endless funds deployed on advertising and promoting the views of the state and its agencies to the public.
Consider the video above: It is a collaboration between two separate agencies. Somebody wrote the script. Somebody called a meeting – perhaps several meetings – between the agencies involved to approve it. Somebody hired the camera man and the post-production crew. Somebody else trooped over to the Department of Housing to brief them on their new initiative.
What’s more, a tweet like that from a state agency does not get issued without approval. There’ll have been a communications meeting. The tweet will have been slotted into a message calendar. Emails will have gone back and forth confirming the date of publication. Since it was issued, and the reaction proved so negative, further meetings will have been held, and statements issued.
And of course, all the video did was remind adults of what should be blindingly obvious even to the most intellectually challenged of us: That being an adult is different to being a child. You have to do, like, housework and stuff. I am only mildly surprised that the video did not include a “how-to” guide on how to sneak your lover upstairs past the parents, but then I remember that increasingly, our young people barely have lovers at all.
Anyway, the video is 90 seconds long. It took three agencies of the state, working hand in hand, to publish. And not once along the way, apparently, did somebody stick up their hand and say “maybe this is a bit naff and tone deaf”. Or if they did, they were not listened to. Despite that, someone somewhere will get a job somewhere else in future because they’ve got “multimedia consultancy and communications, department of housing” on their CV, and this whole mess will have been forgotten by then.
The video, really, is a microcosm of how we are governed, writ large.
You will gain a new insight, I think, into how Ireland is governed if you realise that almost the entire apparatus of the state exists not to solve problems, but to manage public perceptions of them.
I always cite, by way of example on this, the Department of Justice’s response to public perceptions around lax sentencing: People being given sentences for crimes that are too short was not met by that Department by any action to solve the problem. There are no new prisons being built. There was no legislation to bring in mandatory minimum sentences. No – instead the department published legislation to increase the maximum sentences for various crimes. This had the wonderful appearance of making it seem like the state is tough on crime, though in reality if people were not getting the original maximum sentences for their crimes they are hardly likely to get the new, tougher ones. The problem was minimum sentences, not maximum ones.
Housing policy is exactly the same: The state’s response to it has been activity and regulation, rather than delivery. The new regulations for landlords coming in next march are actively driving renters from their homes, but to see that as a failure is to misunderstand the point of the policy. The point of the policy is not to make tenants more secure, but to send a message that the state is on the side of tenants. The actual reality matters less than the perception. Building houses can’t be done, it seems. But slapping new regulations on existing ones is right up the activity, not delivery, street.
All of this, absolutely all of it, is under-girded by a veritable cavalcade of activity. Policy reviews. Glossy policy announcements. Seminars. Webinars. New Ireland Forums. Cross-border policy exchange forums. Pre-legislative scrutiny. A department wide festival for international women’s day. Daily media review emails. Thousands of people, doing things. That very few of those things directly impact the needs of the public is entirely incidental to the purpose of the state.
In the process, the state has grown into an enormous behemoth. It now accounts for the employment of 400,000 people in Ireland. Another 200,000 are employed in the NGO sector. All of these people need things to do, constantly. That is why that video was published: The point of it was not to teach the public anything or advance any policy goal at all. The point of it was twofold: First, to give the impression that the state is doing things. Second, to give the various people employed by the state something to do.
There are a lot of people in Ireland doing entirely useless jobs. And they will, of course, be the very last people to lose their jobs when the next recession comes.