Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I must inform Deputy Feighan that every citizen must be accountable for his or her actions and behaviour. Politicians must realise that the impact on their livelihoods of particular decisions often causes people to become upset and rightly so. Deputy Feighan states that he is not seeking people's thanks. If we seek re-election at the end of our terms of office and if our constituents see fit to reward us, then that should be thanks enough. We should have confidence in the ability of members of the public to make rational judgments and to hold us to account for our actions.

In the context of the Bill and the public service, the reality is that the Croke Park and Haddington Road agreements have facilitated a situation whereby the reality of working in the public service has been stood on its head in recent years. This is a technical Bill which seeks to facilitate redeployment within the public sector and it is important that we should seek to place it in context in terms of what has been done to date and the direction in which matters will move in the future. Public sector workers have made phenomenal sacrifices in the past number of years. The cuts to pay and changes in employment conditions, etc., are probably unrivalled by those imposed in other sectors of the economy. In addition, these workers have had to deal with a billionaire-owned press engaging in public-sector-bashing on a routine basis. The idea that public sector workers are underworked and overpaid is constantly being pumped out by the media. Of course, this is not true and it does not stand up to any sort of statistical analysis whatsoever. The discrepancies in pay between low and middle-income public servants and those at the very top of the sector are vast. The majority of public sector workers are poorly paid in many instances. Thousands of them are obliged to depend on family income supplement and so forth in order to make a decent living.

It is important to say this and to highlight the fact that the job cuts within the public sector of more than 30,000 have led to savings on paper. However, the loss of those jobs has come at an enormous cost. It can be stated that people are working more efficiently and that things are being done better. The reality is, however, that many things that could be being done are not being done. The public is losing out, as are many of those who work at the coalface. It is as though someone viewed this matter in the abstract and decided that because there is a surplus of workers it would make great sense to consider a policy of redeployment which would allow the matching of available resources with areas where gaps exist and would enable people to be more flexible in their outlook. On paper this seems fine, but it is not that simple. For example, a garda clearly cannot do the job of a guidance counsellor and a clerical officer in the Department of Social Protection cannot take up a nurse's job. Skill sets must be matched, and this makes matters more complicated.

We do not have a surplus of staff. In fact, there are not enough public service employees to work in entire areas of the economy. Previous speakers referred to health, education and gardaí - which are often the subject of debate in the Chamber - and the fact that additional resources are required. I wish to focus, however, on what has taken place with regard to county councils.

It can look like a sensible idea to redeploy people but what are we really doing? We must see it in the context of the recruitment embargo as well. The reality is many services are, in effect, being outsourced. It is not that jobs do not need to be done but there are fewer public services because the services provided have been outsourced to private companies. We saw that in local authorities - for example, in the area of refuse collection. There was a surplus of bin workers. Those bin workers were able to be utilised by the local authorities and to be transferred or redeployed into other areas but that came with many difficulties as well. Many of those workers had worked for decades in a particular environment and transferring to a new environment where one is bottom of the pile does not always work out for the worker or management. The reality is that while the council may have been able to utilise those bin workers elsewhere, the public had to pay for the service through a private operator and the people who had been doing that job, who had previously been in a public sector job, which was unionised, secure and with a pension, were replaced by yellow pack workers. People in insecure tentative employment will cost the economy in the long run. We need to factor that in. When we look at redeployment, we must look at the backdrop of the public sector recruitment embargo and the damage it is doing to our public services. We are storing up huge problems in that regard. There has been an absolute bottoming out of services.

Some 1,300 people work in Fingal County Council, the one with which I would be more familiar, and not 20 are below the age of 30. That situation is replicated in other local authorities and in the public sector. Young people are not being employed which leads to a gap in knowledge. Workers at the top have left, there is a group in the middle and nobody under 30 years of age in many area of our public services. That means we are losing out on expertise young people have in terms of social media, IT and all the new training and inputs those people could have. That is a serious problem for the future.

Nobody would be in favour of forced redeployment. The idea of being forced to uproot and move is a huge issue and a huge concern for public sector workers. Even within an area of 45 km or so, it can cause much dislocation for families. People should never be forced to be redeployed. However, what about where people want to redeploy? I have come across many instances of this where somebody wants to move from one local authority to another one. The person has a service or a skill from which another local authority could benefit but if it takes on that worker, it is increasing its pay bill. Unless it can get somebody to swap, the redeployment will not take place because each organisation sees itself as an individual one and not as part of the entire public service. I know of people who are out of work sick and who cannot work in the organisation in which they were originally employed for various reasons of difficulty in the working environment, such as bullying or whatever, and who could transfer to another but the other local authority will not take him or her because its budget will be increased. We need to look at that as well as at the overall skill-set because redeployment is all well and good on paper but when the skills are not there and there are not people to fill the vacancies, one cannot move people.

I refer to the library service in Fingal County Council. One cannot redeploy people to librarian vacancies because one requires a particular skill set. The council could not transfer the bin men into the libraries. We raised this previously with the Minister who said that in areas where skill sets are weak, we can look for a derogation, that people can be employed and that the recruitment embargo can be breached if there is a need for it. However, if the local authority does that within the constraints of the budget it has, what other services will be forfeited? It does not really make sense. It is an anomaly. We do not have decent public services.

Fingal County Council has the most utilised public library service in the country. Some 50% of the population there are members of the library. The State has expended resources developing library services and new libraries in a number of areas. Now we have a problem in that they cannot be staffed. I refer to the age profile of the staff. There are now only 100 librarians for the whole county. Some 50% of them are over the age of 50. Five of them want to retire this year and another two want to go early next year which will bring the number dramatically down. The council has been forced to shut libraries at lunchtime, shut the mobile service and the house bound service in the summertime and get a few temporary workers in but it does not really plug the gap. This is lunacy. Against the backdrop of recession, where library membership has sharply increased since 2011 with people sitting at home needing to access IT services and books on doing CVs or whatever, these are potential areas which could be developed.

The real issue here, which we should be discussing, is that there is no difficulty with public sector workers adapting. They have demonstrated their willingness to do that time and again. The problem is that there is not enough of them. This should not be a Bill about redeployment but about recruitment. Not only does that make sense in terms of delivering the type of services citizens need - people need public services even more in a recession - it also makes sound economic sense because the cutback in public sector numbers has been seriously bad for the economy. It has resulted in job losses in the private sector because the money being taken out of public sector workers' pay packets has deflated the domestic economy and contributed to many of the problems we have. Those are the issues we should be discussing rather than the issue of redeployment itself.

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