Paschal Donohoe (Fine Gael)

In preparing for today's debate, I came across a very appropriate quote from one of the pioneers of our public service, Mr. T.K. Whitaker, who stated:

The day-to-day decisions of government, no less than those of individuals, tend too often to respond to the pressures, the needs, the provocations and the opportunities of the moment. Good management demands the longer view.

In this debate and the report from the OECD, what we are clearly seeing is the longer view, in terms of the challenges that face our economy and society and the need for our public services to respond to those challenges. In examining how the public service responds, we must recognise and emphasise the wonderful contribution our public services have made in dealing with so many pressing needs and challenges faced by the country, from our engagement with the European Union, to Northern Ireland, to the status and recent success of our economy. However, the report does not believe there is a need to review the structures of our public service, rather it believes there is a need to review the culture of our public service. I am not sure how in recognising the significant challenges we are facing, we can get to a point where we can review our culture in the delivery of those public services without first looking at the way they are delivered and the structures in which they delivered.

It is appropriate for us to pause and reflect on the kind of challenges faced by the public service and our economy and society. There are three that are most appropriate for the discussion in which we are engaged. The first is what is happening with our economy. Over the past ten years, we have seen our economy grow on average by about 7.5% per year. The OECD report acknowledges that for the next 20 to 30 years, we are likely to see economic growth of around 3.5%.

The second point is what will happen to the countries against which we have needed to be competitive and perform in the past. Many of those peer countries will change. The centre of economic gravity will move east. The countries that will decide what the benchmark is in terms of competitiveness and how societies are performing are more than likely to be the Indias, Chinas and Russias of the world. This will pose huge challenges in respect of how a small open economy like ours performs.

The final point relates to the role of technology and globalisation given that so many of those influences are coming together to create a rights-based culture in respect of how people interact with public services and to create profoundly different expectations on the part of people in terms of the information to which they believe they are entitled about how their public services perform and the standard which they expect those public services to attain and deliver for them.

I am critical in that I do not get a sense that this report recognises the breadth of those challenges and the fact that in our future, we will need superb public services more than in the past. The statistics on the economy that appeared earlier in the week showed that many of the public sector parts of our economy were leading the overall economy in terms of output and economic development. We will need that performance more than we ever have in the past. At the same time, our ability to pay for it and our economy's ability to sustain it will perhaps be challenged more than at any point in the past. There is a real pincer movement, to use an unfortunate phrase.

I am concerned because I do not get a sense of urgency or vision from this report about what we as politicians will do and what the public services will do to respond to this profound challenge. The report talks about an integrated public service that acts increasingly through networks rather than top-down structures, greater staff training and mobility, the quality of performance indicators and information, and the need to for them to be improved. I had a real sense of déjÀ vu in that we have said these things before. My question is whether those recommendations are strong enough and radical enough to respond to the kind of challenges we as a small open economy will face in a globalised world and economic environment that is changing very quickly.

There is an omission in this report in that it does not place sufficient focus on the need for the individual using these services to have choice about the services they use and information about the quality of performance they receive. It says additional consideration should be given to the development of both quantitative and qualitative performance indicators that are comprehensible to the citizens and that reflect societal goals. That is the only reference I could find to the need to empower individuals in the services they are performing. This report is good and merits discussion but my point is whether it goes far enough in helping us rise to the kind of challenges we face because we have risen to those in the past and our public service has been instrumental in allowing us to do so.