Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

In recent weeks, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan Howlin, has repeatedly denied that the 9,000 public sector workers who have retired over recent months have done so as part of an incentivised scheme under agreements made under the Croke Park agreement. I am not quite sure of the reason the Minister feels he must lead every discussion on the retirements now under address with an indignant rebuttal of the facts. How does an employer achieve significant downsizing of his or her organisation? The answer, of course, is by incentivised redundancies or enhanced retirement packages. It is an absolute nonsense for any Cabinet member to stand up in this Chamber and deny the grace period retirement scheme is anything but an incentivised scheme. The programme for Government commits to a reduction in public sector employees of between 18,000 and 21,000 by 2014. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform reaffirmed this commitment in his budget 2012 announcements, which stated the Government expects to reduce public sector numbers by 37,500 by 2015 from the number of workers in the service in 2008. There is no ambiguity here. Fine Gael and the Labour Party have shouted from the hilltops their commitment to slash tens of thousands of public sector jobs.

This incentivised scheme has not targeted, for example, the much talked about bureaucracy across the HSE. It does not reflect new structures or seek to complement the public sector reforms about which one hears so much. It literally has been a free-for-all that has hit the front line hardest and has resulted in an overnight exodus of knowledge, skills, experience and expertise that have been developed over many years. It is plain silly for any Minister to tell Members the loss of 7,500 staff in the last two months, and 9,000 staff in total, is no big deal. It is a very big deal. Change management consultant Eddie Molloy has commented that such a significant loss of senior knowledge and skills across the public sector would take five years to process if managed correctly. While the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform can talk about transition teams till the cows come home, the simple fact is that by its own admission, the Government knew neither who was leaving the public sector nor the numbers involved until the end of January of this year. The health service alone has lost 4,200 posts, while education, the Civil Service, local authorities, defence and the Garda have lost 2,058, 1,236, 931, 362 and 310, respectively.

In the recently published HSE regional plans for 2012, there is no sign of what the Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, called his "dynamic contingency plan" to cope with the loss of staff. My local HSE region, Dublin-north east, covers north Dublin and counties Cavan, Louth, Meath and Monaghan. It saw the retirement of 400 staff by the end of February and, on top of this, the service plan for this region states that up to 561 more staff will need to leave the service this year. The exodus of 961 staff from one region will be a devastating blow to health services across the board, a fact the Minister could not bring himself to admit when I questioned him on this matter in the Dáil on 15 February. The HSE Dublin-north east plan states these further significant reductions will be needed before any priority replacement staff are recruited.

Last month, the HSE chief executive, Mr. Cathal Magee, told the Committee of Public Accounts that he intends to take on 400 mental health staff. However, when questioned further by Sinn Féin, he admitted that 500 mental health workers, including 370 nurses, will leave the health service under the Croke Park early retirement scheme. This is a net loss of 100 mental health workers hidden behind a so-called good news story by the HSE and is just one example of how skewed the Government's policy is.

The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, perhaps naturally, has shirked ministerial responsibility for managing the decrease in personnel by stating it is a matter for the public services bodies and their respective Departments. Public services bodies must first look at work practices, reorganisation and redeployment and only then, if a Department identifies a "potential exception to the moratorium on recruitment", can it seek new recruits under the sanction of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. However, he and other Ministers have stated they may recruit up to 3,000 new public sector workers, although all may not be on a full-time permanent basis. It is clear there is no actual Cabinet strategy to deal with the impact on services arising from the job losses.

Sinn Féin's proposals to tackle the budget deficit expenditure would eliminate waste and protect front-line services. Our proposals did not require an incentivised retirement scheme and allowed an additional €145 million to ease the recruitment ban for front-line services. Sinn Féin would tackle excessive pay and pension in the upper echelons of the public sector. It is unacceptable to protect the pay privileges enjoyed by the almost 7,000 highest paid civil servants at the expense of desperately needed nurses and special needs assistants. I can only imagine what would have been the reaction of the Minister if the Labour Party was still in opposition.

Fine Gael and the Labour Party continue to peddle the myth that the public sector is bloated. I accept that public sector numbers increased between 1995 and 2007. However, this increase was set against a very low base. Even before the reduction in current public sector numbers, Ireland had the third smallest public expenditure as a percentage of GDP in the world and was only above Mexico and Korea in this regard. People should consider the facts. Heaping private bank debt on to the sovereign has skewed the figures but the fact remains that we do not have excessive numbers of public sector workers.

Savings can be found and must be made. Nobody would argue against that. Flexible work practices and interdepartmental redeployment must be both continued and accommodated. The economic advantages of shared services and online facilities have not been fully realised across Departments and local authorities. This is not reform, however, it is merely a process of belated modernisation. It is public sector management finally playing catch-up with the private sector. Radical reform would be constituted in the form of an agreement which ended the culture of entitlement and lack of accountability across the top levels in the public sector. We are continually informed that these individuals, whomever they may be, are worth the big bucks they are paid. As recent studies have shown, however, this is not the case.

A research paper published November 2011 by the Institute of Public Administration, entitled, Public Sector Trends 2011, found that remuneration rates vary significantly from top levels to bottom levels in central government, with a much bigger gap than that which exists in the Nordic countries. The remuneration paid to top and middle management in central government is significantly higher than European norms, while that paid to administrative staff is towards the lower end of those norms. Let us consider the position in this regard. Senior public servants' remuneration levels are over seven times those of administrative staff. In Nordic countries, those levels are only 3.5 times greater. Middle management remuneration levels in this State are four times greater than those of administrative staff. In Nordic countries, they are two times greater. The Government's organisational review programme of Departments outlines myriad management failures. Such is the depth of the problems in the Department of Education and Skills with the disbursement of European Globalisation Fund moneys that the relevant Minister has described his officials' handling of the funding as "maladministration".

The reality remains that front-line services are delivered by people and if the Government keeps hacking away at public sector numbers, this will make a bad situation infinitely worse. Some 85% of the HSE's staff are front-line workers, with 93% of them involved in direct service delivery. It is nonsense to suggest that the loss of 4,200 positions will not impact adversely on the health service's ability to provide health care. In his initial contribution, the Minister said that, despite the reduction in numbers, it appears things are still being done. He should make no mistake: it is early days.

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