Mary White (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State.

I was fortunate to be in Dublin Castle at the launch of the OECD report on the integration of the public service. Having experience over 40 years in both the public and private sector, I am in a position to comment on it. There are as many clever people in the public sector as there are in the private sector but the management standards in many places in the public sector are not adequate to deliver the service.

The core of this report is that we need a more integrated public service and that the public services should be citizen oriented. The principal of a school and the Secretary General of a Department must act as if they were the chief executive of a private company. Speaking of my experience working 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 16 years, unless a company has nous, and looks after its customers, it will not survive. A public company survives because it has first-class management systems. Many improvements have been made in the 20 years since I left the public sector.

Management is the most difficult science in the world. If a person is taken on, the job should be explained and performance evaluated. The boss must spell out if the person is doing the job right or not. If this did not happen in a private company it would disappear. Many of our problems in delivering public services are due to the lack of good management.

Professor Drumm stated recently that the day must come when Irish people have the courage to demand better public services in the health sector. They forget they pay for the public service. It is taxpayers' money that pays for the service. They must become more self-confident and demand a better service. They should demand that the treatments for our citizens are as good as those for citizens of other countries. If we find that cardiac arrests here are higher than in Nordic countries or another OECD country, we must demand that our standards of cardiac treatment be improved to reach that standard. Our patients in the public health service should not be patient with long waiting lists. Even with private consultants, to whom one pays big money, one might have to wait one hour in a waiting room before seeing the consultant. The citizen must be empowered to demand an excellent service from the public service, for which the citizen pays.

There are at least 360,000 people working in the public sector in Ireland. It is responsible for one in three euros spent in the Irish economy. It sets the policy environment for economic and social development and provides a wide range of essential services. We must take note of the OECD report. The number one change is that we must get metrics to evaluate the service provided by the different Departments.

To be a good manager, one must be a leader. People in key positions in the public sector are afraid to be bold leaders. In contrast, one must be a bold leader in the private sector or one is gone. There must be a mechanism to allow people with leadership skills in the public sector to come forward and take risks without fear of losing promotion opportunities if they make mistakes. If one is a bold leader, everything one does will not be right. If we do not make this change in the public sector and this generation does not get this right, the taxpayer will get very bad value for money.

Those in the public sector are not less clever than those in the private sector. There should be free movement from the private sector to the public sector and vice versa, giving a cross-fertilisation of skills and innovation. For any good business or policy to survive, it must innovate. We must have innovation in the public sector.