The epitaph for the seven years of prudence in public budgets that was the raison d’etre of the governments that ran Ireland from 2011 took place in a brightly lit room in the Department of Health on Baggot Street in late 2018. Rumours about astonishing overruns in the cost of the Children’s Hospital that had circulated through the system for months were reluctantly confirmed by the secretary general of the department at a meeting attended by the most senior ministers and officials in the state.  A few months later the true costs of the national broadband project were revealed, accompanied…

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