The ‘Bike Shed’ has now become a unit of public expenditure, used to measure the relative wastefulness of other extravagant projects.

Ever since it emerged, almost two years ago, that the Office of Public Works had blown €336,000 on a shelter for 36 bikes in the grounds of Leinster House, every other unaccountable and indefensible instance of fiscal irresponsibility is calculated in Bike Sheds.

So, for example, take the public money that Irish Rail wasted on an IT system it subsequently scrapped. For ease of reference, it cost about 150 Bike Sheds, or €50million in old money.

Last week Anne Shaw, the Chief Executive of the National Transport Authority told an Oireachtas committee that they’d known of problems with the contract for some time, and had now decided to write it off as a failure. However, until a decision is made to terminate the contract with Spanish technology company Indra, they’ll continue to pay out €100,000 per week – approximately one-third of a Bike Shed – for a doomed project, literally throwing good money after bad until the legal logistics have been ironed out.

Naturally, the entire board of Irish Rail and the NTA have been sacked over this debacle, especially since Ms Shaw admitted that, despite getting record public funding, the Authority is unable to add a single bus service to the overstretched Dublin service this year because they can’t afford it.

Only joking. Nobody has been sacked, nobody will be sacked and even the politicians, grilling Ms Shaw last week, seemed to have lost the ability to be outraged on the part of the taxpayer whose contributions were shamelessly squandered in this scandal. As FG’s Emer Currie limply observed, ‘I don’t have confidence that the proper learnings have been taken on board.’

So all of those millions, which could surely have funded several new routes to ease the lot of the capital’s commuters, would have been well spent if highly-paid executives, on fat six-figure salaries because of their presumed expertise, acquired some additional ‘learnings’ from the debacle?

In the private sector, I reckon, ‘proper learnings’ from overseeing a project that wasted €50m would have been limited to helpful instructions on how to find your nearest Social Protection Office.

In a public sector where it is tacitly acceptable to spend €336,000 on a bike shed – because no heads have rolled over that obscenity either, and we’ve been lulled into considering the whole affair to have been a bit of a hoot – other extravagances become almost acceptable by comparison.

But instead of relating one episode of unconscionable profligacy to another, even more notorious one, it’s occasionally worth converting this hyper-inflated political bitcoin back into real money. Never mind designer bike sheds, how many buses would that €50m have bought? How many special-needs assistants would it have hired? How many carers would it have funded? How many extra driving testers, to cope with the unacceptable backlog in a country where public transport is too inadequate to meet commuters’ needs, would it have hired? How many crumbling, leaking school buildings could have been refurbished with that €50m, which nobody is responsible for wasting?

At the weekend, the Mail reported that a Dublin local authority had spent €660,000 building a wall in a ditch in Marlay Park. In the insular and self-referential political economy, of course, that’s less than a couple of Bike Sheds, mere chickenfeed.

In the real world, it’s enough to pay the salaries of 15 nurses for a year. The restoration work, commissioned by Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council on the wall in the south Dublin park, is already six months behind schedule. And, you’ll be astonished to hear, it’s also over-budget by €35,000 and counting. In response to a query by Independent Councillor Michael Fleming, the council’s Heritage Officer confirmed that the finished project is expected to cost around €820,000, including VAT.

According to Cllr Fleming, that’s working out at €3,300 per metre, or approximately €50 for every block laid along the 197-metre wall. The Mail spoke to other local contractors to get their estimate for the job, and one admitted that he’d have ‘taken the hand off’ the Council for anything like that rate. Another calculated that ‘if all costs were stretched’, the most the job should have cost was €750 per metre – almost one fifth of the price the taxpayer is forking out.

Cllr Fleming is hardly alone in concluding that the cost of this project is ‘massively excessive’ and represents bad value for public money.

But really, so what? When there were no consequences for anyone for the Bike Shed debacle, and when all we seem to require of executives who blow tens of millions on doomed projects is that they acquired some ‘learnings’ from the process, it is clear that we have lost our ability to be outraged over the waste of our money any more. And so last week’s revelation that we were writing off €50m (and a further €100,000 a week for the foreseeable) passed by with barely a ripple of comment.

Ditto the €50-a-block wall in a Dublin park: evidence that we are being governed by people who spend our money as if they were Russian oligarchs has become so commonplace that it rarely elicits more than a shrug any more. They’ll shake their heads and agree it’s terrible, opposition parties will issue press statements, the suckers paying the price will amuse themselves with jokes and memes on social media for a few days and then, just like the famous Bike Shed, it’ll simply become part of the national landscape, a great sinkhole swallowing up your hard-earned money that we’re just powerless to stem or block or close.

By the way, do you know the correct name for that wall in a ditch in Marlay Park? It’s called a ‘ha ha’ and, yep, the joke is definitely on you.

Re-Turn scheme boils my blood 

More reasons to hate the Re-Turn Scheme: Because the machine spits some bottles back out, even though they’re properly labelled and intact, and only accepts them on a third attempt. Because many supermarkets have no container for refused bottles, so people just leave them on the ground beside overflowing bins. Because a cranky manager has to approve your receipt in Lidl, before you can use it at the self-service check out, and then walks away rudely when you ask why. Because it is costing Dublin millions more in street cleaning bills as people scavenge the bins. Because standing in line to feed bottles into a machine for piddling rewards feels like a lab experiment to train chimps. I’ll be Raging Against the Re-Turn Machine – a night of music, comedy and chat to protest the scheme organised by Aontu’s Larissa Nolan – in Nearys, off Dublin’s Grafton St, this Wednesday evening. Time to re-turn this ridiculous nonsense to the drawing board.

Security concern for Meghan... a likely story

Did anyone really believe that Meghan Markle was going to bring her two children to the UK, this week, to visit their grandfather for the first time in four years? There was never a chance that she’d have allowed the great unwashed a glimpse of their carefully-hidden faces, not until she can monetise it to the nth degree. 

They’re pleading security concerns for the change of heart, but the psychodrama continues – yesterday morning it was announced that Harry would be accepting an invite to stay at the palace during his visit, signalling a thawing of relations, followed swiftly by the news that the invite had been withdrawn because it was accepted ‘too late’. 

Well, you know how it is - he just didn’t give them enough time to climb into the attic and take down the camp bed.

 Let's pray appeal hopes are lost in translation

Is it really possible to live in a country for 20 years and fail to pick up the language? Personally, I was deeply sceptical of Parnell Square butcher Riad Bouchaker’s demands for interpreters and translators throughout the criminal process. Apparently he sat through his trial muttering about ‘s***Irish’ and ‘filthy Irish’, indicating that English is now his first language of choice. 

And he certainly had a good enough command of the language to negotiate the complexities of our social protection system, making sure he applied for every possible benefit, and it was his fury at being refused even more taxpayers’ money that prompted the attack – after, of course, he’d prudently waited until the bigger children had left. But pleading incomprehension is a handy tack for the inevitable appeal, if any flaws are found in the translation process. 

Let’s hope it doesn’t work for him.