Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

This afternoon I had the great honour of meeting a colleague of mine, Christine Milne, the former head of the Australian Greens and a Senator in the Australian upper house for many years, who is in the Gallery. We considered the role of the Civil Service and she said Australia, which is a very similar country to ours in a range of areas, had made a big mistake in recent years by replacing the independent civil service with a contracted civil service, particularly at senior management level, whose members could be fired if they did not deliver on the objectives of the government of the day. She believes that doing so undermined the strength of the civil service because an independent civil service can argue against government. Civil servants here do a superb job in managing the Oireachtas and sometimes we have different views, leading sometimes to a tension. When I was first appointed as a Minister, the Secretary General of the Department gave me the full box set of "Yes, Minister" to teach me how the tension worked.

We do not need to keep the service ossified as it was in 1915 but there is a concern that we have had too many generalists in the Civil Service and now need specialised services. There is a case for a specialised communications capability and for efficiencies in how it works and is developed but there is real concern that what Fine Gael is doing goes beyond getting a more effective Civil Service. Rather than being about efficiency and developing specialisation, it blurs the lines between Government and the Civil Service and, indeed, between the State and Fine Gael. Maybe Fine Gael has a tendency to do this because it was one of the parties around at the foundation of the State and sees the institutions of the State as an extension of itself but in this House it is a party like any other. It is not guaranteed continued power and if its members were in opposition, I am sure that if Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil or any other party set up a communications unit to promote the Government, they would be shouting "Foul". They would say it blurred the line as regards one of our strengths, which is a Civil Service that is independent in every way. We have seen the effects of this in the way Project Ireland 2040 was developed. The unit may bring certain efficiencies but there are questions about how the local newspaper advertorials were done.

There was criticism recently of the communications relating to the Taoiseach's visit to the United States, and not just relating to the political aspect of his visit. Perhaps there was something in the old-fashioned Civil Service way, where they did not blow their trumpet as if they were involved in marketing, PR and branding and perhaps it is no harm to have a slightly more cautious Civil Service, which is understated and uses language that is not as brash. Some of the videos we saw from the US trip, such as the "Ireland, Here We Live" video, set the wrong tone, one of overconfidence and over-reaching itself. For that reason alone, the Government should reconsider and step back a bit.

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