Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome the Minister and his team. I apologise in advance as I must leave at some stage to go to a meeting of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight.

I join with the Minister in paying tribute to the public service in all its guises. I believe there have been huge changes in recent times under very difficult conditions. Senator Conway-Walsh and I have seen at first hand the manner in which the service responded to the tragedy this time last year at Blacksod and the search operations for the Irish Coast Guard helicopter, R116. The cross-collaboration between many different agencies made a very difficult situation a lot easier for the families. That group was acknowledged this weekend at the Mayo awards but there has been huge improvement right across the service in very difficult situations.

I will now tease through a number of the issues within this document. The Minister suffers from his party's tendency to be choosey in what he does and does not remember pre-2011. There was considerable public service reform under way pre-2011 also. The Minister speaks of developing our people and organisations as one of the three pillars. How can we develop people and organisations when currently there are different pay rates for people within the public service who are doing the same job? The Public Service Pay Commission is engaged in a process of addressing pay equality. It is the one issue that is affecting morale and cohesion within the public service. There needs to be a greater sense of urgency about the matter.

On human resource, HR, practices within the public service, action No. 12 in Our Public Service 2020 is to "Embed strategic human resource management in the public service". Is the Minister happy that HR management is best practice within the public service currently and is most relevant to working lives and those who seek to work in the service in 2018 as opposed to another time? Leaving the pay issues aside, have we a service with HR practices that are more responsive to people who may wish to take career breaks or travel breaks and so on? How many vacancies exist within the public service at present and is there an area that gives concern to the Minister with regard to an inability to fill vacancies?

The Minister referred to innovation a lot in his speech, but the reality is that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is also the lead Department for procurement. Innovation is irrelevant to people if they cannot access broadband. Many of the public services that are offered, especially those such as Revenue's online service, are inaccessible if a person does not have broadband. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is pushing everybody towards online applications but a farmer working in agriculture is more than likely to not have broadband. A dog's dinner has been made of the procurement process around broadband. As the lead Department for procurement, does the Minister think it is appropriate that there is only one bidder for such a major project? How will the Minister marry the ambition for innovation within the public service and public service users' inability to access those services online?

On the issues of bullying and harassment within the public service, I have recently submitted a series of parliamentary questions. There are quite a number of claims in some Departments and very few in other Departments. Is the Minister confident in the consistency of application of bullying and harassment policies in all levels of the Civil Service and the public service? Is the Minister confident that the skills are there at line management level to manage this? Given recent publicity around all sorts of allegations, does the Minister have any plans to change policies or refresh policies within the services?