Michael Finucane (Fine Gael)

The Minister of State, Deputy Parlon, will be aware that between 4,500 and 5,000 people were recruited to the Department of Agriculture and Food at a time when the numbers involved in farming were declining. That seems like a contradiction. A colleague of the Minister of State in another body, the ICMSA, queried that aspect of the matter recently. The benchmarking document is neither quantifiable nor tangible, but it contains a large amount of wishes. Senator Maurice Hayes asked what it means to say that "we will improve customer relations". One would imagine that public servants would have been providing good customer relations all the time. Anyone who analyses the benchmarking document will find that it contains many such pious platitudes. The people involved in the benchmarking process were within the loop, so they knew what was going to emerge from it.