Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

In the meantime, management and unions, under the auspices of the sectoral implementation bodies that are working in each sector, have been getting on with the job. We are perhaps being too low key about early successes. I want to highlight for Members a few tangible changes that have been happening in many work places across the public service. In the Garda Síochána, revised rosters have been agreed in the specialised detective units and the traffic corps. They will allow the gardaí involved to be deployed more efficiently to meet demands for their services. These changes to rosters foreshadow the much larger job of re-rostering across the country to meet police demands with a reduced number of gardaí. Talks have already begun on developing pilot schemes to achieve these changes.

The Prison Service has opened new accommodation for prisoners at Wheatfield Prison and for female prisoners in Limerick Prison. These new blocks have been opened with a more efficient staffing model based on the principles set out in the Croke Park agreement. This has resulted in a saving of staff and significant costs have been avoided as well as, of course, helping to alleviate some of the accommodation issues that are a feature of our prisons.

Discussions are ongoing in the education sector on the introduction of new contracts, including the extra hour. Since I last spoke to Senators and used this House to challenge the teaching unions, all teaching unions are now engaged in these discussions and they are advancing quickly.

In the health service, the CEO of the HSE recently outlined some key performance outcomes in 2010 taken as a snapshot on 30 September. They include emergency admissions being more than 11% higher than the 2010 target and slightly more emergency admissions than for the same period last year; more than 2.5 million people have attended for outpatient services so far in 2010, which is just over 3% of the 2010 target and more than 5% ahead of 2009 outcome; and more than 9,600 home care packages were delivered to people, 0.5% ahead of the 2010 target and 9% more packages than were delivered this time last year. Also in the HSE, management and unions are working together to address the practical implications of the departures by the end of the year of thousands of staff under the voluntary early retirement scheme and a voluntary redundancy scheme introduced by the Government for certain categories of staff in the public health service. This type of co-operative approach would have been difficult to envisage only a few short months ago.

In the Civil Service, hundreds of staff have been reassigned from other areas of the Civil Service to social welfare offices to cope with increased demands. Similarly, staff will be redeployed to help process redundancy payments more speedily. A deadline has been set for the move of the community welfare officers into the Department of Social Protection with effect from 1 January. As all of us know, this is a highly significant move because, unlike the other redeployments mentioned, it is cross-sectoral with staff moving from the HSE to the Civil Service.

Finally as has been highlighted, some clearly inefficient practices on credited time and attendance patterns are being eliminated. On this issue, there is a tendency in the media to focus only on the minutiae of discussions on efficiencies in the Civil Service, without looking at the bigger picture of change in more than 90% of the public service. As a consequence, there has been much chatter about bank time and privilege days. Instead, we should be welcoming the fact that Civil Service management have taken the opportunity presented by the Croke Park agreement to tackle upfront and early some clearly inefficient and outdated practices.