Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State but I am in two minds as to whether I should welcome the Bill. Since the 1920s, a system has been in place that will now be changed. The debates in the Dáil and here will be useful in questioning the need for this change.

When I became chairman of An Post in the early 1980s I was told the big difficulty with civil servants was they were so conservative that they would not be able to adapt to changes in a commercial state-sponsored body. The opposite happened. Those who were conservative as civil servants were, when released from the shackles of the Civil Service, competent and capable in adjusting to the marketplace.

It seems strange to initiate a root and branch reform of a system that has served the country so well over the past 80 years and I question whether it needs to be changed. The Bill makes it possible to make public service appointments at the level of individual Departments and agencies rather than centrally. That might be no bad thing. I am generally in favour of delegating authority as far down the line as possible. Most of would probably agree with that approach. It may well be that individual Departments know their own business best and are thus in the right position to choose the right people to work for that business. There is, however, a danger that when one repeatedly replicates any function one ends up re-inventing the wheel on a systematic basis. Doing business at the local level tends to cut one off from a pool of central expertise built up over the years. This cutting off happens in both directions. Individual Departments will not be able to draw on a central pool of expertise nor to contribute to a central pool. What lessons they learn will tend to stay with themselves rather than be disseminated as best practice across the public service.

What is true of expertise is also true of reputation. The Bill contains provisions aimed at ensuring that this delegated responsibility is delivered to the highest standards. I hope that the aspirations of the provisions will be fully realised and that they will not turn out to be meaningless rhetoric. However, even if the standards are maintained under the new system and the best existing practice is disseminated through the public service, one cannot ensure the same for reputation. One cannot transfer a reputation for integrity and independence by means of a law passed in this House. A reputation is a most valuable asset but not one that can be treated like a property. We can transfer the mechanics of making appointments in any way we like but we cannot similarly transfer a reputation. It will be up to each Department or agency to build up its own reputation for fairness and integrity in making appointments. A reputation can only be earned over time and in the nature of things some people will succeed in achieving it better than others. In the short term we will have to live without the benefit of reputation for integrity and fairness. Even in the long term, when the Departments and the agencies have built up their own reputations we will have to settle for a more spotty and uneven reputation than the one currently enjoyed.

All of this makes me wonder why we are setting off on this route. What is so wrong with the existing system that it must be reformed in the radical way being talked of? What is so urgent about the problem that it must be given the priority accorded it in the Government's legislative programme? The answer to the latter question is clear. It is decentralisation. There is no secret about this. In publishing this Bill the Government made it clear that its passing would facilitate the decentralisation process. This makes me more rather than less cautious about whether we should take this route. It is clear that the Government is contemplating not merely removing many of our civil servants from one place to another. The need for this Bill arises from the Government's realisation that in order to make decentralisation work it will be necessary to carry out a major shake-up in the personnel of each of the Departments to be moved. If the Government did not anticipate this need, there can be no doubt about it now in view of the quite negative reactions of the civil servants to the proposal.

Whether the Government realised it from the beginning, it is now clear that Departments to be moved outside Dublin will be staffed by a set of people radically different to those who now staff them. This would not matter greatly if the new staff were all at relatively low level but it is clear that the further up the hierarchy one goes in each Department, the less prepared the civil servants are to move out of Dublin. If the Government gets its way, in addition to moving Departments out of Dublin it will also have to replace most of the top management in each Department.

What concerns me is the effect on what may be termed the collective memory of each Department. In any organisation, particularly in the private sector but also in the public sector, there is a great deal of ongoing expertise which is found not in the files but in the brains of the top and middle management. It comes from experience. This is rarely an issue, because in the ordinary way those people are not replaced at the same time. Many of them stay on to ensure continuity on a rolling basis. My experience from business is that it is hard to hold on to that, and when one loses that knowledge, memory and expertise it is very hard to replace it.

As we learned from the widespread downsizing of organisations in the 1980s and 1990s, it can have a devastating effect on an organisation's efficiency if a large number of people are either moved or replaced. The collective memory of an organisation is impaired because there is too great a change of personnel to ensure the necessary continuity. This is what worries me about the decentralisation proposal. It is not the only aspect which causes me concern but it is the main one. The approach seems to be based on the assumption that one can replace top and middle management on a wholesale basis without any detrimental effect on the organisation's ability to successfully carry out its mission. History, including in commercial business, indicates otherwise. I doubt that enough thought has yet been given to this aspect of the change and I remain to be convinced that the present decentralisation proposals are a good idea.

By extension, given that the Bill is largely driven by the decentralisation proposals I question that it is the wisest way to proceed. My greatest fear is that with the best will in the world we may end up destroying some of the most valuable aspects of our public administration. I have seen this happen in business, in commercial terms and in other organisations. We must consider the collective wisdom and knowledge involved. In our business we call it "sitting with Nelly". One of the ways one learns a business from the outset is to sit beside a "mother hen" or buddy from whom one assimilates knowledge. Whatever happens at the lower level, it is essential we do not lose that at middle and top management levels. I urge the Minister of State to consider deeply the implications of what we are discussing, not just in terms of decentralisation but with regard to the changes proposed here.