Tom Barry (Cork East, Fine Gael)

I welcome the Bill, which provides for the establishment of the Department of public expenditure and reform and the transfer of functions from the Minister for Finance to the Minister for public expenditure and reform. It sets out three main functions, which will transfer under the remit of the Minister - the entirety of functions relating to the public service; public service reform functions which will, for the first time, be placed on a statutory footing; and responsibility for managing public expenditure within the overall envelope set by the Government.

It is necessary to put the public service on a statutory footing because the Bill comes about after we learned an expensive lesson from the mistakes of previous Governments. The legislation ensures the public service will be correctly matched in terms of size and skills to the business at hand. As populations change, domestic need and other external influences change and the public service needs to be flexible over time. It also needs to mirror what has always been done in the private sector. Flexibility and cost awareness are the two foundation stones on which all business is based and they have been strengths of the private sector up to now.

However, a new approach comprising flexibility and cost awareness will also have to be applied to the public sector, which will have to be run with an efficient and delivery-based approach based on business acumen. Change is never easy and it is always resisted but we are in a position where we cannot play semantics. Change will happen one way or the other. Some elements of the public sector might not like it but, unfortunately, the message is that if change does not happen, those who obstruct it will have to move aside and allow those who will undergo change to do their job.

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