Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

On the Professor Kevin Rafter group proposal to have a single head, I spoke to him at length. The group looked at the model in Britain and in other countries, and they changed the model a couple of times. Their recommendation was to have either of two options, the first of which was a designated person involving the set up of a new entity with a new Secretary General who would be the head of the Civil Service. Given the capacity - there is 25,000 civil servants here and 250,000 in the United Kingdom - I wondered whether that would work all that well. The alternative, and probably preferred, recommendation was to have an existing line Secretary General be head of the Civil Service on a part-time basis, which I did not think worked.

My first objective was to have a collective entity because the biggest deficiency, as I have seen looking deeply into it, is the siloing of the Civil Service, that everybody in the Department of Justice and Equality looks at the Department of Justice and Equality and many civil servants go in at a relatively low grade and then migrate, never having moved beyond. It is the same in a lot of line Departments. The first task is to have a much more integrated public service and a collective leadership is a better way of doing that.

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