It is time for Government to deliver - Public sector reform
While the general tenor of the proposed reforms can be warmly welcomed, the overall approach was lacking in specifics.
It was more about aspirations than precise proposals.
The Government plans to eliminate the current budget deficit of €4.8 billion by 2011, but it is essentially passing that responsibility to a four-person committee that will oversee the cuts, staff rationalisations and implementation of efficiencies.
The committee, headed by economist Colm McCarthy, is due to report next June.
There is not as much scope to cut the number of civil and public servants as is sometimes assumed.
Many of the people in the public service, like gardaí, doctors, nurses and teachers are providing frontline services and there is very little scope for cutting those jobs.
The aim of the Government approach announced yesterday is to provide an essentially unified public service by eliminating the kind of blockages that have been frustrating reform and movement.
There is also the suggestion that a system of proper assessment of individual performance of public servants would be introduced.
Another welcome aspect of the suggested reforms would be the sharing of information so that people do not have to go from one agency to another to secure necessary documentation, when the actual agencies could readily share the information.
There is a sense, however, that the Government has been shy about being too specific after the mauling it received in the wake of the recent budget.
The latest initiative is a result of a request in January 2007 by then taoiseach Bertie Ahern for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to review the functioning of the Irish public service.
The OECD report was published in April 2008. It noted that the public service had grown by 30% between 1995 and 2007.
The number of agencies had more than doubled to 800 since 1990, but there were no official statistics available in relation to the size of those agencies, or how many people they employed.
Last April, when the OECD reported, Bertie Ahern, in his last days as Taoiseach, declared that there were too many agencies by half.
This was an indictment of his own government’s performance. “The way the public service is managed must be modernised,” he had declared shortly after becoming Taoiseach more than ten years earlier.
“There is no other way to provide better Government.”
Yesterday, his successor Brian Cowen declared: “The need for reform of our public services has become increasingly clear in recent times.”
It was already clear ten years earlier.
The Government is now essentially passing the buck to Colm McCarthy’s committee.
We have had enough reports and too much talk already.
It is high time to deliver.
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