Public sector is fighting for change

I read the article in a recent Irish Examiner entitled “Spare us the waste and do your job” with interest.

As the title suggests, the article set out to blame the public sector, and the health sector in particular, for many, if not all, of the ills that have befallen that sector.

The basic thrust of the argument was to castigate the HSE for recruiting — from the private sector — people to do jobs that surely could be done by people from within their own ranks. I am a public sector worker and I and every other public sector worker agrees with this sentiment. In fact, public sector unions have been trying to get the government to listen to this line of reasoning for years, but to no avail.

For your information, when things started to get a bit tight, government departments were among the first to start cutting back on outside consultants and revert to looking internally and training up their own staff to do the work. Unfortunately, I believe the private sector employers started to give out about the millions they were losing to government contracts not being renewed.

Under the heading “Performance and Skills” in the Croke Park Agreement it states — The parties agree that, in order to ensure a high performing, high productivity public service, appropriately skilled personnel from outside the public service will be recruited to secure scarce and needed skills at all levels. This theme is continued throughout the Agreement and is a sop, I believe, to IBEC and the employers and is their way of continuing to get ever scarcer government money for what was a very lucrative area in the private sector.

The closing line in the article in your paper read “... it is time we saw a radical change of mindset throughout the public service and especially in the state agencies”.

Well, excellent idea. Unfortunately, it is an ongoing government mindset that requires change, not that of the public sector.

The ordinary working people of the public sector absolutely agree with the thrust of the argument, but when you have a government seemingly determined to help out certain sections of the private sector, there is not much we can do about it, except try (as we have before) to get them to change.

We in the public sector will keep at it. Will you join us?

Jerome Flanagan

Dublin