Over the past few months, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Jack Chambers has been voicing his concern at the poor record of public servants in delivering vital infrastructural projects and in policy implementation more broadly.

To inject urgency into the system he established the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce (AIT) chaired by Sean O’Driscoll, who has an outstanding record of achievement in the private sector as former chairman of the Economic and Social Research Institute and former chairman and chief executive of Glen Dimplex. Chambers also encouraged public servants to take more risks to get things done.

The last time I heard this much talk about the need to “enhance our risk appetite”, as it was put, was in the boardroom of one of the pillar banks in the period leading up to the banking crash of 2008. Spooked by the roaring success of Seán FitzPatrick’s swashbuckling Anglo Irish Bank and a growing unease that the upstart Anglo might attempt to purchase their long-standing respectable bank, the bank’s management loosened its lending criteria. And we all know how that ended.

With the closure of the National Asset Management Agency last week, it took 18 years to clean up the big financial mess, while leaving thousands of individual citizens scarred by the events of that time.

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The main shortcoming of our public servants is not that they lack the courage to take risks. What they lack is the necessary expertise. In 2008, as the banks were imploding, only a handful of people in the Department of Finance had diplomas in banking. The........

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