Derek McDowell (Labour)

For the moment, I would like to be non-specific about the God awful places. If there is a recruitment agency in Gort, Claremorris or wherever, working to a licence holder which may be in Galway or Dublin and which has a code of practice set by the central agency, there are several different layers which do not give me the certainly I currently have, and which all of us share, that the system is being operated without fear or favour and on a truly independent basis. I worry about this aspect because I am not convinced it will work in practice.

I am not sure how the Bill will impact on promotion and transfer within the Civil Service. It appears it is intended that recruitment to the Civil Service will be exclusively at the lower levels such as CO or EO, grades currently directly recruited by the Civil Service Commission. I appreciate this does not sit terribly comfortably with what I said earlier, but on one level that would be a pity because it is necessary to have the flexibility which involves bringing people into the Civil Service at all levels. Sometimes the deficiencies are not at the lower level, where one can usually fill appointments without too much difficulty. There was a difficulty a few years ago, but that is not normally the case. The difficulty normally arises at specialised level, where people with specialised technical skills are needed or, as Senator Mansergh said, where people need to be recruited to the Department of Foreign Affairs where there has been significant expansion in recent years. As I understand it, we do not, for example, recruit at ambassadorial level or decide we want somebody to be the ambassador to Lithuania, Latvia or elsewhere and thereby get somebody who knows those countries well. In so far as we are directly recruiting from the labour market, we could usefully do so at all levels and it is a pity we have not done so.

The Bill has its origins in Sustaining Progress and arguably goes back to Delivering Better Government in the 1990s and the Public Service Management Act which followed that. It is reasonable to ask whether some of the measures introduced six or seven years ago have been effective as they are at least as important as the measures currently being canvassed in this Bill. I am talking, for example, of the right given to Secretaries General to effectively dismiss staff from the Civil Service. While I do not know the figures, I suspect this power is used rarely although I suspect the power to discipline is used more regularly.

None of us wants to see significant numbers dismissed from the Civil Service — far from it. However, we acknowledge there would be a serious effect on morale if a significant number of civil servants believed, as I think they do, that others doing a similar job at the same grade, perhaps at the next table, were under-performing or, in some cases, not performing at all. We have all spoken to civil servants in this position. There is a need for Secretaries General, or perhaps for managers further down the line, to exercise greater discretion and management skills in the way they deal with this.

The flip side of this is offering staff incentives and acknowledging when they perform well, a matter we have discussed for some years. However, it has been introduced only at the highest levels, namely, at Secretary General and assistant secretary general levels. This is a pity. If we cannot take a tougher line with those who are under-performing — I understand why we do not — the least we can do is incentivise those performing well. It is a pity the negotiations which have gone on fitfully over a number of years have been unsuccessful in producing a positive result because it is in everybody's interest that people who perform well are recognised in a tangible way.

There is an interesting argument that the Bill brings to the fore, namely, the nature of the Civil Service we want. Our tradition has been one of employing generalists, those who are flexible and can be moved from Department to Department and will, likely as not, spend most of their careers within the service, getting promoted and going as far they can or want. It is not necessarily a bad thing that there seems to be a shift to bringing in staff on short-term or fixed contracts for particular purposes but there needs to be a balance between the two. There will always be a role for generalists. However, the service needs the facility to contract out and bring in staff for short periods to do particular jobs. Ideally, it also needs some crossover between the two. There should be no reason why generalists cannot do a particular job for three years, for example, and then be moved to another job. There seems to be a sense that if somebody is put into a particular job, they stay there for a long time even if the job is effectively redundant. There is not the flexibility needed in terms of re-appointing staff or allocating them to other jobs, which is a pity. We have not yet got the balance right and I am not persuaded the Bill will help us to do it.

The Bill is on balance positive. There are ways in which it could fail and I worry about some issues, including that of special advisers referred to by Senator Mansergh. However, broadly speaking, it is going in the right direction and I support it.