Liam Twomey (Fine Gael)

We have an excellent Civil Service and public service. We may at times criticise senior management in the public service, for example in the HSE, as well as other aspects of the public service and Civil Service. However, the greatest problem has been the particularly bad political leadership in the past decade. It is regrettable that there have been so many lost opportunities as pointed out by many comments in the OECD report. Benchmarking was supposed to have been a means towards helping to reform the public service and improve how things are done in recent years. It was an opportunity that was basically wasted at huge cost to the taxpayers now and into the future.

The Minister of State described decentralisation as a learning process. Decentralisation as announced in 2003 by the then Minister, Mr. McCreevy, was an absolute disaster and was thought out on the back of a stamp. It made no sense to the proper running of the Civil Service and public service. The same people who made a mess of decentralisation, of benchmarking and of reform of the public service are still in control of the process today. As then Minister for Finance, the Taoiseach was central to the process. I do not believe the Taoiseach and his Cabinet colleagues have it in them to introduce the necessary reforms requested here. I believe the senior civil servants are very supportive of these reforms, but they are not getting the political support.

Some interesting comments have been made on the matter. The former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern, said that having 800 agencies was too "many by half." It was the same former Taoiseach along with the present Taoiseach and other Ministers, including Deputies Martin and Cullen, who set up these quangos. The same people were responsible for many of the problems the OECD review pointed out. The report contains a very interesting comment which states:

Agencies vary significantly in size and budget and it is unclear how much public funding they use for their own functioning, for further distribution or for investment. Neither is it known exactly how many staff they employ.

The report stated these agencies do not know how many people work for them and for what purpose they are using their budgets. I thought it was an urban myth when somebody pointed out to me that one of these Government agencies had a budget of €250,000, of which only €40,000 was to be distributed. It cost €210,000 to run the agency to distribute €40,000. It remains an urban myth because, as we can clearly see from this report, nobody is quite sure what all these agencies are doing and what is their purpose. That is a complete failure of the Government over the last ten years to walk the walk about reforming public service along with the senior public and Civil Service personnel, who wanted these reforms carried out. However, the Government was too busy meddling with matters for purely political reasons. The decentralisation plan epitomises that sort of interference, making announcements the Government knew would never go anywhere.

The Taoiseach said, "It is clear to me, with the fact that resources will not be increasing at the same rate as up to now, that we will have to look at everything". He is saying, now that we do not have the money we have to stop wasting it. That is the sort of performance we have had from this Government over the last ten years. The Minister has done a major discredit to many of the civil and public servants. Many Government Members try to blame the HSE in the same way and suggest the mess we are in is the responsibility of senior civil servants there rather than the Government. The Government should publish a report on the sort of reforms it has carried out over the past decade and the sort of change it is talking about. People can then make a comparison with what great reforms have happened in the last decade.

There was much political interference in the establishment of the HSE. Some units that were established have had four or five different directors over the last four years. There is such a serious lack of continuity and clear focus on what the Government wants that even new organisations it is establishing are falling apart in a couple of years.

It is interesting to hear in the news today about what is happening in FÁS. Clearly there was an absence of governance in a huge State organisation that was spending €1 billion of taxpayers' money. A recent report showed that IDA Ireland has a huge number of sites that are of no great benefit to anybody. One has to question what has been happening to taxpayers' money over the last number of years and much of that responsibility lies with how the Government and its Ministers do their jobs. Some of the public sector unions have some responsibility here about which there should be more discussion. We have been waiting to see reforms in the health service for many years, yet nothing can happen. Nothing significant has happened.

It was announced that the Minister was happy to reduce the working hours of nurses from 40 hours per week to 38 if it is budget neutral. Up to one third of the nurses working in the health services can make the work practice changes to make that happen. Why cannot we have that sort of initiative? Why did Government Ministers not work with the public sector unions to make those sort of strategic changes over the last decade? It is because the Government members are too lazy to do it. They were too happy spending taxpayers' money because they thought this boom would never end. This Government has been responsible for the failure of reforms.

I have no great confidence that many of the proposals in this report will be implemented. Numerous reports have been published from every aspect of the civil and public service but when one requires real backbone from Government politicians one does not get decisive action. E-Government is an example of that. E-Government has failed dramatically in this country because no great emphasis was put on it over the last ten years. It should not be given to the Department of Finance. It should have its own separate Minister. We should get rid of half a dozen junior Ministers and have a Minister responsible for e-Government across the services because we need it right. It should be done immediately.

Unfortunately, we get only eight minutes to respond to the Minister. I will get the usual criticism that I am great to criticise but cannot suggest any solutions. With only eight minutes to talk it is very difficult to provide a clear debate. However it is clear, from reading this report and watching what has happened in this country over the last decade, that much of the performance failure and lack of governance has come from the political establishment and that has led to problems in the public and civil service.