Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I agree with the Taoiseach that the Revenue Commissioners, in particular, have improved communications and now have texting facilities for customers, which is genuinely innovative. Social welfare provision has also been reformed. However, in recent times, partly as a consequence of decentralisation, as the Taoiseach knows, people are told they must submit their applications months in advance if they are coming to retirement and as regards child benefit, lone parent allowances etc. When we had limited technology the total turnaround time was less than 12 weeks and it is now much longer. The point is that when something happens whereby the service visibly deteriorates, all the jargon about better regulation, better Government and so on is meaningless to someone who is coming up to pension age having paid his or her contributions and finding that it is far more difficult to get the State pension than he or she first thought. Will the Taoiseach agree that what we are doing in the public service at the moment is growing middle management, people who write reports? What is being done about this type of proliferation?

Everybody in senior management in the public service gets a bonus. How is a distinction made between some Departments which palpably do not produce the goods and those that do? They all get bonuses and there is no distinction. Even the head of the HSE received an €80,000 bonus.

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