Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In March 2022, we launched an overall blended working policy framework for the Civil Service. Since then, particularly over the past 12 months, the policy has been rolled out to individual Departments and other State bodies. The target was that, a year after its implementation – we are approaching that point now – we would revert to the Government and collate and review figures on our Departments’ key performance indicators and outputs. That work is under way. My officials are engaging with Departments to form a view on what impact this is having on the delivery of some of the latter’s targets. I am hearing mixed views from, for example, Oireachtas colleagues and my engagements in my constituency. I get the sense that a number of Departments – I will not name which, as I need to get the data first – and State bodies have managed to change seamlessly. They tend to be organisations that were much further down the road in the roll-out of a digital approach to their work. However, I am getting feedback from Members of the Oireachtas that there are some public services that they feel are being compromised. The work I mentioned is under way. I hope that, before the end of the first half of this year, we will quantifiably have a better sense of where performance stands.

We also have to be conscious of the importance of these policies from an employer competitiveness point of view. Maybe this will change in the time ahead, but over the past two years, we have been in a very hot labour market. From the point of view of the retention of staff and recruitment of new civil servants, we have needed to have a blended offering in terms of where work is done.