Response of Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton to the Cardiff Scandal

The Week in Politics: Sunday 6th November

Clearly a mistake was made in the Dept. of Finance, the issue is what was the seriousness of that mistake and was he culpulable.

I think the general view and certainly it’s Michael Noonan’s view is that he was not culpulable, this was a mistake in how numbers were put together.

This wasn’t an issue of culpulabe failure in pursuing the duties of his office.

These are the words of an incredibly stupid man or the words of a man who has no capability whatsoever of dealing with unpalatable facts.

The Minister goes on:

I think in terms of accountability, we do need to have genuine accountability I think the tradition has not been of pinning responsibility on individuals who are responsible for certain performance and then holding them to account and tying payments to their performance, that’s not a tradition.

But as Brendan Howlin has said it’s going to become a tradition because there’s going to be clear performance indicators set for every head of agency to be accountable so this will be a sea change in the way we measure performance and hold people to account.

In other word;

We don’t have a tradition of accountability in this country but from now on we are going to make people accountable.

I’ve been listening to this bullshit promise for decades.

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The Minister