Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 19 January 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Statement of Strategy 2017: Department of Finance

10:00 am

Mr. Derek Moran:

As I said, we publish the executive board minutes. If one goes back over them, one will find Brexit cropping up as a discussion among the management team on a very regular basis. It is a case of then integrating that down through the business plans. I take the Deputy's point that it is one thing to say that we see it a problem and do a piece of work on it 18 months out. However, we have followed that up. On budget day only a couple of months ago, we published the sector-by-sector exposures and where the concentration might be. Some small measures were taken in the context of the budget. They were not major, but some measures were taken. In addition, there are the more disaggregated impacts. We have continued to do that. I take the Deputy's point. We need to drive that down through the organisation. The Deputy's core question is whether I am comfortable that what I have at the moment is at a good level. No, our manpower plan is for higher than what we have. However, there is the reality of trying to get people through the door. We have had a very high turnover of staff. A 14% turnover in the course of a 12-month period in an organisation the scale of ours is quite significant. Some of it is as a result of our success during the crisis of getting very good, highly-qualified people in who are now doing well within the civil service. Most of those people did not leave the public service, but moved within it. That is the benefit of it, but it creates a problem and stretches us.

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