Draw Breath

Sarah Carey has an angry post on the terrible tragedy this weekend gone in Wexford. It certainly seems like something was brewing and it raises serious questions over the non-handling of the situation by people in the HSE.

That said, I'm not sure that we can automatically look for firings from the embers of catastrophe. It may just not be fair to point fingers without getting a sense of what's going on.

So: the (social) science: the management of risk is all the rage at the moment in regulation circles, and a one or two people, like Christopher Hood, have suggested a close connection between the monitoring of risk and the enthusiastic allocation of blame. Ultimately, Hood argues that this can have a perverse effect on bureaucratic behaviour, with administrators being more motivated by the need to avoid blame than by the precepts of their professions. For instance, school administrations might be reluctant to allow kids on outings for fear that one of them would graze a knee, despite the obvious value such experiences offer to children.

From another perspective, performance targets have a similar effect on administrators: stick a target on them and, largely for fear of the consequences of failing the expectations of bosses or politicians or whoever, they'll game the system. They'll do this either by focusing on the target in a way that produces terrible consequences or simply by lying. Demands for performance can permeate down to subcontractors whose managers can sideline the judgements of professionals in order to meet the expectations that have been placed on them. Something that can certainly lead to outright disaster. My good friend Mel Dubnick was one of the authors of the landmark article linking perverse administrative behaviour to the expectations placed on bureaucrats (by the way, I have copies of all these papers: drop me a line if you're interested and lack a subscription).

Anyway: the point. There was certainly a fuck-up of monumental proportions in the HSE this weekend, but only with the benefit of hindsight. Most certainly, this family was displaying very disturbing behaviour, but again, we don't even know precisely what was said by the Guards to the people they spoke to in the HSE. We don't know how many calls like this the Guards make or how serious they thought the situation was. Which isn't an attempt to shift blame in any sense. I'm simply pointing out that all these organisations deal with very troubled people day in and day out. The question has to be: was there anything in the perceptions about these particular troubled people that gave rise to unsually significant concerns before the event?

After all, precisely how risk averse do we want social services to be in this country? I presume that, while we certainly don't want paralysis, neither do we want children taken into care the instant alarm bells are raised. We don't want social workers and psychologists responding to every call made.

We want them, despite the risk, to exercise some judgement over when to intervene and when not to intervene.

And we certainly don't want a regime in place where there is only one step between an error of judgement and a P45. Think about the incentives that would produce.

So the serious questions raised are as follows. What is a good indicator of risk? And how, if it's at all possible to acertain that, ought that to be communicated through the system? And finally, was the system out of whack a few days ago or, brutal though it might sound, was this tragedy beyond the powers of a state acting within acceptable bounds? Even if such things have happened before, can we really envisage systems where they would never happen again?

I doubt any investigation will tackle these issues though. Better to hang a bureaucrat out to dry.

Update: I've just re-read the comments to Sarah's post and entirely agree with her that it can make sense - be good community policing as one commenter put it - to bring a priest into the situation to talk with people. Communities are not simply amenable to state intervention.

Where I differ from her is in deciding that states can always intervene at the right time and place and - in the absence of a state that gets everything absolutely right - we'd probably prefer one that intervened less than necessary to one that intervened more.