There's something about a posh dinner that really gets on people's goat. When successive health ministers were wasting €160m on the Ppars computer system – the one that didn't work – there was a brief kerfuffle and then everybody forgot about it. When the Department of the Environment was spending €50m on voting machines that also failed to function properly, people were mildly exercised and got on with their lives. When it's revealed that senators, including Shane Ross, will cost the taxpayer an average of €172,000 in salary and unvouched for expenses next year, everybody shrugs and accepts the waste. When, however, Fás spends less than that figure annually on first-class trips abroad, expensive dinners and, famously now, a haircut, all hell breaks loose. After 10 years of the Celtic Badger, and excess on a grand scale, the idea of ridiculous but relatively tiny sums being spent to keep people high on the hog captures the imagination in a way that much more serious examples of waste were never able to do.

Which is not to argue that what has been going on in Fás is justifiable. It isn't. But one person has already resigned, and another has been suspended. The Public Accounts Committee is investigating the agency. The Comptroller and Auditor General is investigating it. The guards are inquiring into other Fás-related matters. By Irish standards, this is accountability on a grand scale. If the same accountability applied to government ministers as has applied in the last few weeks and months at Fás, Martin Cullen would be backbenching away down in Waterford, Noel Dempsey would be teaching in Trim where, in another example of waste, his old job has been kept open for him, and Mary Harney would be drying her own hair.

So what is it about Fás that has struck a chord that other instances of waste did not? It can't simply be the posh meals or the first-class flights, although all these things make for a sexy story and are easy to get outraged about in the new, depressed Ireland. If that's all it was, the Fás story would be one principally about envy; and clearly it's about much more than that.

The wider context, it seems to me, is the current scapegoating of the public service as the cause of all our problems. Received wisdom, across the public spectrum from the far right to the so-called left, has it that if we could just reform the public service, increase efficiencies and fire thousands of people, our economic crisis would be over. To the people who have been parroting that mantra, the Fás story came as a godsend. "Look," you could almost hear them squeak. "Told you so. Irish civil servants are like the Borgias. They're Hiberno Neros, fiddling the expenses while Ireland burns."

The problem with this argument is that it is profoundly misguided, and based on ideology rather than any careful consideration of the facts. I hesitate to mention the widely quoted OECD report which found that the Irish public service was good value for money and less populated by employees than the public service in any other western European country you care to mention. But that's what the report said. There is no fundamental problem with the Irish public service. It could do with being more efficient, as many private companies could. There is almost certainly scope to reduce employee numbers. But anybody who tells you that this is the answer to Ireland's economic mess is in denial about what needs to be done.

The rest of the world seems to get it. In the US, Barack Obama is working towards a stimulus package worth about €700bn to kickstart the economy. The EU has come up with a package worth about €130bn. In Britain, Gordon Brown is cutting vat and taxes on lower-paid workers to stimulate his economy. In Ireland, however, we have decided to go our own way. We will not be cutting vat. We will not be cutting taxes. We do not want any part of the EU stimulus package.

This is a funny attitude to the EU from the same government that will stress the Union's vital importance during a second Lisbon referendum next year. But it should not come as a surprise. For this is a government without vision, or leadership, or any clear idea what to do. It appears unqualified to deal with the biggest crisis facing the country in decades, and in its ignorance and in its panic, it has identified civil servants on €50,000 a year as the country's biggest problem. If this keeps up, we'll all be cutting our own hair.

ddoyle@tribune.ie