IN THIS column yesterday we set out a bleak picture of how the airport firefighters’ dispute was allowed to happen: it was always someone else’s problem and the States body charged with negotiating pay and conditions really didn’t give a damn if the airport closed.

Anyone who felt that assessment too harsh had only to listen to the testimony provided at yesterday’s tribunal of inquiry session to realise just how bad the absence of accountability and responsibility within government really is.

The airport’s deputy director set out clearly how it had been experiencing a recruitment and retention problem for months, how that was putting the operation of the island’s gateway facility at risk and how it was at least in part due to money and overwork caused by men having to cover for former colleagues who had left for better paid jobs.

Yet despite all those warning signals, highly-paid civil servants and a posse of politicians let the airport close and had no strategy for its reopening.

While the tribunal of inquiry is examining the fine detail of how that happened, the broad context is already familiar to islanders: when you have a government in which everyone is in charge, no one is – which means that the Public Sector Remuneration Committee can complain it was usurped rather than apologising for its lamentable handling of the affair.

A substantial body of evidence already exists to support that view. The Burchill Report, a separate independent analysis of the role of the States as employer, the Wales Audit Office’s withering assessment of the absence of good governance and even the Tribal reports on expenditure all point to serious deficiencies in the way that the States operates.

The tribunal of inquiry’s own report will doubtless add to that overwhelming weight of evidence and its £250,000 price tag – if it can be kept down to that – will be a further contribution to the mountain of money thrown at identifying the same problem.

The real issue is when the States will actually do something to resolve it.

With even the Public Accounts Committee going soft on actioning the WAO report it commissioned, the dispiriting conclusion is that there is no commitment to change.