Transition teams to oversee a smooth delivery of services when thousands of public sector workers retire at the end of this month have not yet been formally established, the Taoiseach has admitted.
This is despite his claim in an RTÉ interview last Sunday that the high-level teams are "in place" to avoid chaos when hospital staff, teachers and gardaí retire over the coming weeks.
Asked about the status of the transition teams just three weeks before the exodus of staff is due to be complete, Enda Kenny told the Dáil that they would be "approved by Cabinet next Tuesday".
His apparently conflicting remarks prompted Fianna Fáil to claim that the Government was not prepared for the drop in public sector staff numbers.
FF party leader Micheál Martin said the transition teams were a "figment of his imagination" and "invented on Sunday because it sounded good" for RTÉ.
Speaking in the Dáil, Mr Martin asked if there was a plan in place to deal with the potential service chaos.
Referring to an admission by Health Minister James Reilly that some elective surgery would be postponed because the effect of staff departures, Mr Martin asked why there was a "drip feed" of information about the possible problems arising from the early retirements.
Mr Kenny said details of the actual numbers leaving each department had not "crystallised until the last few days" and "the figures didn’t really become clear until very recently".
The Government had expected that 9,000 people would retire early because of the new pension arrangements, which come into effect in March.
However, Mr Kenny said the latest figures indicated that 6,600 people planned to retire before the end of February.
This included 1,008 civil servants, 2,263 in the health sector, 2,000 in education, 859 in local authorities, 241 in the Defence Forces, and 297 gardaí. He said discussions on the transition arrangements had been going on "for quite some time, but in the absence of accuracy of figures".
It is understood that, last Wednesday, a Cabinet sub-committee discussed the possibility of putting transition teams in place for the health service and the Taoiseach expressed the view that if they could work in health, they should work elsewhere.
Yesterday, he told the Dáil that five such teams would be set up to cover the health, education, justice, local government, and civil service sectors.
"By next Tuesday the transition teams, and the way that they’re going to manage the business in each of these sectors, will be presented by the minister for public sector reform in a memo to Cabinet," he said.
Independent TD Finian McGrath said that an "emergency crisis" loomed in the health service as a result of the staff reductions.
Mr Kenny replied that it was "virtually impossible to know what situation might arise in any individual hospital at any one time. That’s life and that’s reality."
He said the teams would focus on managing the reduced staff "so that the crisis and catastrophe that some people predict won’t become a reality".
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Wednesday, February 08, 2012
