Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Talking about public service reform is a little like attempting to peel a grape; one wonders if the pleasure of eating the grape is worth the effort and time taken to peel it.

Broadly speaking, large elements of our public service function well and the majority of our public servants do very good work. The OECD recognises that a vibrant, functioning public sector underpins economic growth. It also recognises the key role our public service played in Ireland's drive for economic prosperity. The Industrial Development Authority, and latterly the National Treasury Management Agency, are good case studies in that respect.

It is important that we do not forget the significant achievements of the public service and concentrate on planning for more achievements in the future.

We see many people jumping on the bandwagon and looking for any stick with which to beat the public sector. This OECD report is not a stick with which to beat the public sector. It is something of a fillip in terms of the great work part of the public service does and is in many ways a manifesto, even if the language is somewhat difficult to grasp, for the comprehensive renewal the public service needs to go that extra mile for the new Ireland of today after the years of economic expansion and now facing an uncertain period of containment and even faltering growth.

We want a modern, responsive and citizen focused public service. Reform must not be a euphemism for cutbacks or a Trojan horse for a neo-liberal agenda where the only way to deal with the public service is to privatise it, outsource it or get rid of it. We need a fundamental renewal of our public service that puts the citizen first. We must renew our public service to make it fit for purpose and fit to serve Ireland in the 21st century.

Many people are taken with the idea of contracting out all public services but it must be borne in mind that regarding services such as security, education and health it is difficult to envisage the quantum of needs of the citizen being fulfilled purely by private sector profit-driven corporations on their own. We do not have a model of that available anywhere in the world. It can happen in rather narrow areas for a period of time but it tends not to happen in a comprehensive way. For example, if all the babies in a country are to be vaccinated, a properly organised and funded public agency will be required to do it. That is the case if we are talking about Ireland, the United States, Scandinavia or the developing world. Public services are and should be an essential feature of any civilised society.

The truth about the Irish public service is that some elements of it are excellent while others cry out for serious change, renewal and reform. Any consideration of public services must restate the obvious — the public service exists to serve the citizens who, having paid their taxes, are entitled as a right to expect reasonable levels of service in key areas such as health, education, security, transport and the environment.

There is no reason public services and public servants here should not welcome the challenge of renewal this report, and a legion of other reports, puts forward as being central. The public service must move on. It must meet the needs of the citizen effectively, efficiently and at a reasonable price.

The private sector has changed a great deal. There was a time when banks did not open at lunch time. It is taken for granted now that not only can one go to one's bank at lunch time but one can avail of banking services on-line. The public service must parallel and follow what is happening in the world of private commerce and industry and also deal with the fact that public services are now judged against a global benchmark.

Some of our young people travel to Australia for a year out and experience a quality public transport system. Older people travel to Lisbon and are amazed at the type of public transport system there. When they return here they wonder why such systems are available in comparable countries, some of which do not have our income levels, but not here.

If we want to be a knowledge-based society, with high level jobs and high earners who are attracted to live here, our country must function well in terms of the services it provides. We do not want some form of gated community where people are gated in their employment and at home because they do not want to be in the ordinary part of that society. If we want to be at the top in terms of economic performance in the private sector, we also need a vibrant, functioning public service.

Much of the public service has responded well to the challenge of modern Ireland. A good example is the Revenue Commissioners, who collect vastly more taxation, upgraded their computer services under a great deal of pressure and, for the past 20 years, engaged in a real and effective form of decentralisation. They did not simply send functions to isolated locations but decentralised large elements of their services and decision making to areas such as the mid-west region. They show that the public service can do that.

Similarly, the country owes a debt to the Trojan work done by teachers and principals in developing areas who have faced not only the challenges of major growths in population and the need to build and manage extra schools but also the huge new immigrant population that must be catered for. In that respect, I read the last case study at the end of the book about school planning. It defeated the authors of the report in that they failed to understand the full dimensions of the challenge. They pulled their punches when it came to the sad lack of performance of the previous Minister for Education and Science and a number of the officials involved in the debacle of school provision. We have ended up with segregated schools which may be the ghettos of the future unless the public service can recognise that from a policy point of view it is counter to our future economic success, and it must be dealt with. The report is useful but it is not perfect.

Decentralisation was a political stroke. It had operated on a much smaller scale but very successfully in the previous ten to 15 year period and was partly initiated when Labour and Fianna Fáil were in Government together. It was a slow and rather expensive process but at that time offering local temporary vacancies in places like Donegal, Sligo and even in Wexford was an enormous economic boost to those areas because the unemployment rate in some areas was well over 20%. It was a tremendous economic fit as well as being innovative.

The problem with the McCreevy report, which the Government must revisit and it is not just a decision for the Civil Service, is that it was a political stroke. Everything was to decentralise all over the place and the consequences of it were that it is incoherent and very destructive, as the OECD report points out, to the collective corporate memory in various Departments. It has resulted in a 90% turnover in some sections. Had the Civil Service been involved in the management of a more modest programme of decentralisation from the beginning, it is quite possible that much more progress would have been made by now, at far less cost than the political stroke undertaken by the former Minister, Mr. McCreevy. Civil servants will be aware that people are being decentralised under what is known as the "hot bedding" system. They are going to various locations to work for two or three days. People are hiring apartments and some use them for the first two or three days of the week and then go back to Dublin or wherever while others take over the flat. It is incredibly costly and certainly not constructive in terms of people's job satisfaction. The Labour Party has said that this needs to be re-audited and reconsidered and an agreed framework arrived at which is not destructive of the Departments and services involved.

I welcome, too, in this report the proposal by the OECD that the charges introduced by Fianna Fáil for applications under the Freedom of Information Act be scrapped. The sole purpose of those charges was to limit applications for information to which the public and the media should be entitled. They should be in a position to analyse what has gone on in terms of Government performance. The suggestion in the report of greater staff mobility and integration between State agencies, local authorities and the public service would be welcomed in principle, I believe, by the majority of public servants, not least some of those interested in decentralisation — or not, as is the case with more than half of them. However, it will be extraordinarily challenging to deliver that type of change, particularly now when finances are tighter. How does someone who has worked in FÁS, for example, for 20 or 30 years transfer to the general public service system and vice versa? I do not know whether consideration has been given to that.

There is also a suggestion about a two-tiered structure of public service — introducing a type of upper management tier that presumably will have its own pay structure — which needs to be watched very carefully. We have seen an extraordinary gulf arising between the pay of the highest and lowest grades in the public service in recent years, including the pension entitlements of the top bosses, which are estimated to be between 10% and 30% of their salary value.

We have had a unified public service in Ireland since the foundation of the State, one that has largely been free of corruption and unified in purpose. If we are to introduce a segregated two-tier system of the generals on the top on super-pay pensions and conditions, with the ordinary foot soldiers at the bottom, on or close to minimum wages, that will have massive implications for the public service. It may be attractive in the short term from a cost-cutting viewpoint, but as with the Garda structure, because this is such a small country there is value in a unified service to which the people working in it owe a duty of loyalty to the citizens and institutions of the State, as opposed to one in which the lower ranks in particular, perceiving themselves to be abused, are dissociated from such a commitment.

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