Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I have listened to the Taoiseach answering these questions for the past half hour and I confess I am still unclear on the reason the State is to pay another €500,000 for another study on the public service from the OECD. Among the various other studies that have emerged are that published earlier in the year by the NESF, the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, published in June, which states that problems remain in a number of State agencies regarding value for money, the benchmarking report and the strategic management initiative. As the Taoiseach indicated earlier, there is also the work being done by the QCS research group, Fitzpatrick Associates and the QCS officers' network.

Is it now time to stop studying the public service and to start reforming it? What does the Taoiseach expect the OECD to tell us that we have not already been told in many of the reports published heretofore? The NESF report indicates that there is often a wide gap between what public service providers believe they are providing and what people actually receive. Does the issue at hand not revolve around narrowing that gap? Is the latter not what Ministers are supposed to be doing? If, for example, there is a gap between what the public service believes itself to be doing and what people actually want, is it not the responsibility of Ministers to ensure that line Departments and agencies under their remit deliver what was originally envisaged?

Why are we continuing to study the public service? Is this merely some kind of substitute for inaction on the part of Government to introduce the reforms required? Some of these reforms are extremely simple in nature. I refer, for example, to putting in place staff to answer telephone calls instead of requiring members of the public to push various buttons, be transferred from one voice message to another and not have access to a facility whereby they could talk to someone who might assist them with minor queries? In a country with a population of just over 4 million, it should not be impossible to organise the public service in a way which makes it accessible and which ensures that it delivers that for which people are paying.

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