Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I can hear the "Yes Minister" debate happening in the Department in which it is argued, "Minister, dear, this would be absolutely outrageous; imagine tying us to a time limit and we would have to deal with so many issues and it would be so impossible to do this." The fact is that in dealing with much more complex planning issues, it actually operates, as for example, permission to build a nuclear power plant would come with fixed time limits. I think the Minister of State has been badly advised and he is falling sway to all the arguments we have all heard thousands of times. If the Minister of State was on this side of the House he would say, "Hang on a second, this is just an out." Unfortunately, as he knows, the charter of rights is not a statutory obligation, is not judicial; it can be ignored and there is no sanction if people ignore it and they will give the excuse that they are very busy.

I thank the Minister of State for taking the opportunity to come down to the timber mill. I was involved in timber milling. In a timber mill everything is streamlined and nothing falls on the ground. It is a case of organising it to allow for the minimum amount of work and lifting and everything shot down the line in sequence. Many offices have papers and files here, there and everywhere and there seems to be no flow system. If factories were run that way, they would never produce any goods. It is time the public service offices operated on the same principle as factories, that the work is pushed through in a simple, effective manner and that we stop the files falling on the floor and the whole system being disorganised. I am not asking people to work harder; I am actually asking them to work less hard but more systematically. If they do that they would provide these decisions on time and they would not need to give excuses that they are fierce busy because they cannot remember where they put the files. I am always saying that most office administrators would be appalled if the same standards were applied to them in terms of the business flow in a systematic way that is standard in any industrial regime anywhere in the world.

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