Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the presentation. I may have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning such that the witnesses should take what I am about to say with that caveat. I love the Irish Civil Service. If I was advising my children on their career options, I would tell them to into the public service or the Civil Service because young people can avail of major opportunities and learn a great deal by doing so.

On the question of how I would grade this report in terms of feedback, I could not even give it a D. To be honest, I would give it an F in terms of what it does for me in providing feedback on public service performance. There is interesting material in this report. I hear from a lot of civil servants that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has done particularly well in the management of the crisis in terms of its own budget expenditure. I note that pay expenditure in that Department has increased by 25% in the past five years while one of the Departments in which I am interested, the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment, has remained static in that time. I note that the average pay for civil servants in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is €49,000, whereas in the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment it is €39,000. The same applies in respect of the Department of Finance. It is a qualitative assessment of the characteristics of our public service that the real power lies within the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and I note that.

This review does not tell me how we are moving from relying on generalists to specialists, which is a strategic issue in terms of our thinking on how our public service develops. I would like to know the background of the type of people we are taking into the public service and the staff turnover within Departments, including those that have a high staff turnover and those with a low staff turnover. This report does not tell me any of this type of qualitative information. It provides only the bare figures in terms of the pay and pensions bill but I would like more qualitative information on our civil servants. For example, I would like to know how many are coming in from other organisations, how many are leaving to go to other organisations, the average length of time staff remain in Departments and so on.

There is much discussion around disclosure in the area of health. As a matter of principle, all data relating to the public service should be publicly available at the touch of a button. If there are road works taking place in a particular area, for example, I would like to be able to quickly find out, via the Internet, the name of the contractor, when the contract was written and so on. We should be disclosing everything we do unless we are restricted from doing so on foot of data protection or security reasons. All of the material and figures in this report should, by definition, be available in order that we can assess it, but that is not the case.

I will explain why I give this report an F grade. I am interested in a number of areas covered in the report. In respect of to the Department of Culture, Heritage and Gaeltacht Affairs, for example, the report states, in the context of North-South co-operation, that the number of organisations supported by the Ulster Scots agency is up by 95 to 374. Everyone knows that North-South co-operation is in dire straits and that this data tells us nothing. I have real concerns about the state of the Irish language. I hear regularly from people in the Gaeltacht that the language is dying. There are no young children speaking Irish but one gets no sense of this from the data provided in the report. According to the information it contains, attendance at clubanna óige is up by 71 to 1,300. What does this mean in the real world where the Gaeltacht areas are dying?

On heritage, I read a brilliant article yesterday written by Pádriac Fogarty of the Irish Wildlife Trust. It is a damning indictment of the destruction of our environment that is currently taking place, with widespread loss of species and destruction of habitats. The latter as been going on for a long time but is now reaching a critical point. I get no sense of that from the report in terms of the data it provides regarding payments towards cessation of turf cutting on designated sites and so on. What Deputy Lisa Chambers said is true. What is the impact of what is happening? This is difficult to assess because some of the issues, including the health or otherwise of our Gaeltacht, are long-term. One cannot apportion success or failures in this regard to public service performance but these are the metrics by which we should be testing.

EUROSTAT published another major report yesterday. The report in question shows that Ireland is the worst when it comes to the generation of plastic waste. We produce an average of 61 kg each in plastic waste every year, which is twice the European average and 10 kg per person above the next worst country. There is none of that information in this report. I would be ambitious and say that if we are interested in carrying out performance reviews, then the report should refer to international comparisons - including in respect of where we stand in European league tables - and five, ten, 20 and 50-year trend diagrams and analysis. A mere tabular listing of how many organisations are supported by the Ulster Scots Agency, which is the quality of a lot of this material, does not tell me anything.