Nothing personal, they said when interrogated.

It was just she claimed to match International Best Practice. The minute they heard the phrase, they shut down.

Their reaction goes to the heart of the biggest problem we have in this country at the moment.

It's not the slow-down in construction. Not the departure to China of high-tech assembly. Not the dollar-damage to Waterford Crystal.

It's that we live in a lumbering bureaucracy we don't have faith in.

In the last decade we lived, not in a country or a nation, but in an economy. We were invited, on a daily basis, to be proud of the economy we lived in. Small, but perfectly formed, that economy. Growing apace.

Precisely when we stopped living in an economy and started to live in a bureaucracy may not be clear, but the symptoms are floridly evident. The symptoms start with terms like International Best Practice, Benchmarking, Centres of Excellence and Protocols. Forget Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Forget Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. We're now expected to respond with belief and excitement to a set of bureaucratic ideals nobody in their right mind would find exciting. Instead, because of permanent perversity, we not only reject them, but assume the people who use them to be telling lies even when they aren't.

The takeover of Ireland by bureaucracy was helped by the creation of hundreds of little quangos, each delivering some small aspect of the multiplicity of issues government departments used to deal with. Never mind the fact that each of these little quangos has maybe six-and-a-half employees: sure as shootin', it'll still have a Five Year Strategy, an HR Strategy, A Vision Statement, A Mission Statement, a Branding Concept, a Health and Safety Strategy, a Risk Management Strategy and an Equality Strategy. Not to mention designated executives in charge of implementing each Strategy.

Once upon a time, organisations had plans and did stuff. Now they have Strategies and Accredited ways of doing the stuff they never get around to doing.

Accreditation is the dubious offspring of the old ISO 9000 syndrome: another way to ignore the customer while box-ticking your organisation's way to a purchased credibility.

In the beginning, accreditation was useful. To be the first hospital accredited by the Ace Overseas Accreditation Agency was only mighty. Put it one up on other competing hospitals. Now, every hospital is accredited by someone, somewhere, at enormous cost . . . and, as a result, accreditation is now a baseline, a pre-requisite. And not just for hospitals. For everything. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find the shoe-polishing service at Dublin Airport carrying a sign that it's been accredited by some overseas body.

"The year you achieve accreditation, it takes up 40% of personnel time, " one manager of a recently-accredited organisation told me this week. "Thereafter, to maintain accreditation, it takes 20%."

That makes no sense, particularly in a pressured service business, but once box-ticking bureaucracy takes over, it creates a competition of costly inessentials. Never mind the customer, feel the accreditation. We can prove, on paper, that we do stuff in a particular order to particular standards.

One of the things accredited organisations can prove is that they commit to training their people. So the six-and-a-half employees of the tiny organisation get sent to learn the Seven Characteristics of Leadership. It doesn't in any way change the way they do their job, which is just as well, because who the hell would they lead if they had actually had a sudden onset of leadership skills?

Bureaucracies take comfort from the repetition of phrases like Centres of Excellence. Now, a Centre of Excellence has a lot going for it. It does a critical mass of a particular procedure, so you don't end up with a general surgeon operating on your gizzard who has done maybe one other gizzard operation in the past three years.

The problem with concepts like the Centre of Excellence is two-fold. The first is that it's always in the future, while our problems are always in the present. The second, and more important, is that it becomes a negative measurement: each Centre of Excellence must prove it's not falling below a particular standard. Which is all well and good, but which militates against flair, charisma, innovation, creativity and sheer bloody-minded determination to be the best by a country mile.

A doctor named Atul Gawande looked at Centres of Excellence devoted to Cystic Fibrosis in the United States. All delivering excellent service.

All hitting a particular level of morbidity and mortality.

Except that one of them didn't match Best Practice as so defined at all, at all. The patients attending this particular hospital tended to live more than 10 years longer than those attending all the other Centres of Excellence. Gawande went to find out why.

The reason turned out to be an obsessional, take-no-sh*t leader, who paid no attention to the accepted measures of success, but fought for (and with) each individual patient to achieve impossible outcomes. He and his team knocked Best Practice on its bureaucratic ass.

With the best of intentions, Ireland, over the past few years, has fixated on measurement, regulation and strategy, building a culture of box-ticking bureaucracy that now poses arguably the biggest threat to its future.

Bureaucracy militates against all the characteristics we need, as times get tougher. Fulfilling its requirements, as we cope with the slowdown in the economy, is like trying to run a marathon in diving boots. Not the way to go.