Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I am not sure what the difference is between what the Taoiseach has said to me, the phraseology he used with regard to the industrial action and what I put to him, which was whether he did not think the time was right. Industrial action is taking place and it is escalating. It is causing very significant disruption to the delivery of public service, such as in the passport office, in the Department of Social and Family Affairs, in local authorities and right across the board. I do not hear anything from the Taoiseach or anything from anybody on the Government side as to what is being done to try to resolve it. The Government has a responsibility to ensure that a normal service is delivered to the public and if industrial action is taking place, as there is, the Government has a responsibility to do whatever can be done to resolve that. I do not see anything being done. All I see and all that I have seen since the turn of the year is that the industrial action situation is simply getting worse and becoming more widespread and disruptive. I see no response from the Government and I get no indication from the Taoiseach today that he intends to do anything about it. It is time we started hearing from Government as to what is going to be done about it or will the Government allow this action to drag on and become worse? That is my first issue and I ask the Taoiseach to be specific in his reply.

In respect of the wider issue of public sector reform, it is one of those issues that keeps being talked about and about which reports are produced but there is very little action. One of the tragedies is that in the talks between Government and the unions prior to Christmas, there were, as I read it - I read the seven or eight documents most of which had been signed-off or virtually signed-off - reform packages relating to a number of Departments. They seemed to me to be delivering the most extensive levels of reform seen in the public service for some time. Yet the Taoiseach collapsed the talks. What is his understanding now of the status of those documents? Are they still live or are they dead since the discussions were collapsed? Does the Taoiseach see any prospect of resuming discussions on those documents? What is the position?

At one stage, there was a Department of the Public Service and very considerable reforms of the public service were achieved in the lifetime of that Department. It was wound up and subsumed into the Department of Finance. We now have a Department of Finance which is responsible for the normal budgetary processes, Estimates and now, banking, in addition to responsibility for the public service. It is widely speculated that the Taoiseach is considering some extensive re-jigging of Departments. Would he agree there should be a separate Department of the Public Service which would lead a process of reform in the public service and this would be one way of driving forward such reform?

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