Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In terms of productivity generally, my Department was set up with two objectives. First, it had a public expenditure role, to work towards a deficit of less than 3% of GDP and this has been the overarching fiscal imperative of the Government for the past four years. Now that we have reached that, we have set a new horizon, in accordance with the fiscal rules voted upon by the Irish people, and we are working towards our mid-term objective, the MTO.

Parallel to that and equally important has been the reform agenda - reform of the public service and reform of the political sphere, in terms of FOI and all the rest. I have said that reform is now hardwired into our public services and just as every progressive private sector company will look for innovation and ways of doing things better and more efficiently, so will the public services. We will not just do this in the period of the crisis, but forever, because the more efficient we become, the more resources I can redeploy - what I describe as the "reform dividend" - into providing more front-line services for crucial services delivered by people, for example, An Garda Síochána, nurses, teachers and special needs assistants. That will be the ongoing objective of Government strategy.

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