The Kettle's Boyled: The rise and fall of the clerks

I can’t help thinking that our esteemed Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine writes its circulars in ancient Greek, and then uses a very old version of Google Translate to turn them into something approaching English.

Once written, in the most expensive piece of real estate in Ireland that is the Department offices on Dublin’s Kildare Street, hundreds of clerks gather in a great circle and clap each other on the back to celebrate a job well done.

I have a horror of clerks. They can turn the simplest task into a complex web of puzzles that could take a lifetime to solve, just by weaving a load of unnecessary rules around it. And nobody has managed to bring this over-complication to a fine art better than our friends on Kildare Street.

We’re not the worst country for making simple things difficult, others can outdo us on that. I was in a Notary’s office in the Romanian city of Giurgiu a couple of years ago, attempting to transfer some properties from an Irish NGO to the Local Authority. When I saw the clerk in charge of the photocopier taking delivery of two large pallets of copier paper I knew we were in for a long day and I remember feeling glad I don’t live there. A friend of mine who used to be a member of their government explained that they inherited this top-heavy system from the French who had colonised the country at one point. Following my day in Giurgiu, which turned into two days of stamping and signing enough paper to fill a skip, I could only conclude that I’m glad I don’t live in France either.

Clerks are necessary, and always have been. In the past they were looked up to, they had superior literary and numerary skills, and they recorded things that made government function. Their talents were recognised by society, with the surnames showing their importance . But in the last hundred years or so they sort-of lost the run of themselves. Anything simple they could manage to lay their hands on became complicated, layers and layers of unnecessary and self-perpetuating chaff obscuring the original purpose of the exercise.

The dominance of the clerks may at last be coming to an end, however. AI (not the kind that saved us bringing the cow to the bull) but artificial intelligence seems set to take over their work. In the near future, a computer programme will do the same job. It won’t be long until the real work, the things done by real people with tools other than a pen, will be what earns respect in society, and a little machine in the corner will record what needs to be recorded.

I don’t know what they’ll do with Ireland’s most expensive office space, but I’m sure the little machine will think of something.