One for everyone in the audience

For a brief moment I was fooled by the headline – “Taoiseach to scrap his ‘Big Brother’ media monitoring unit.”

This is the special unit set up by Fianna Fail in 1997 to monitor the media and report back to ministers about what was being written and said about them on the airwaves. Pat Rabbitte got it about right:

“A Fianna Fail espionage unit funded by the taxpayer to monitor what its political opponents are saying about Fianna Fail.”

It’s the sort of operation that’s common in all corrupt states. Up until now I thought that there was only one such unit but apparently there’s one in every department – One for everyone in the audience as it were.

Now, as part of a cost-cutting exercise, the unit is to be privatised and not scrapped as the headlines suggests. Let’s try to figure out how this will save taxpayer’s money.

No civil servant will lose his job or be demoted in any manner whatsoever so no cost saving there. And if we are to judge from countless instances in the past the setting up and running costs of the new office will be enormous.

So, yet another layer of (very expensive) bureaucracy is being created in order to save money??