Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)

I concur wholeheartedly with the Deputy in the sentiments he expressed. Bureaucracy, properly administered, can be wonderful, but it can be a drag on job retention and creation. As the Deputy pointed out, we must be careful in the coming months and years to root out unnecessary bureaucracy. Internationally, there are many wonderful examples of how this has been done. Having worked closely with a number of public servants in the Department, I am adamant that there is a willingness to make this happen. Whether that willingness permeates all sections of the public service is questionable. A report published by the European Commission last May, which was carried out by Accenture and the department of economics at the University of Oxford, concluded that if our public service acted in the manner it should act, eliminating bureaucracy and encouraging job creation where it may happen, we could create up to 15 million new jobs across the EU by 2020. That is the challenge we are facing. We urgently need to engender an innovative and almost entrepreneurial culture in the management of the public service. The situation in which we find ourselves now, where those people are working with severely reduced resources, may actually cause that to happen, because it certainly has not happened in the past.

If the many silos in our public services were run as efficiently and creatively as some entities in the private sector, that cultural shift which needs to occur would actually occur. We need to have our public services essentially serving the public. It sounds very trite, but that is how simple it is. That is not happening at the moment, but it most certainly needs to happen in the future.

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