Time to do the public a service and recruit a recruitment ban quango

I WANT to propose a new quango. A very small quango. A time-limited quango. This quango would go through Government departments and public sector bodies to look at the recruitment embargo in action.

Of course we need to strip out vast numbers from the public service, just as almost every household in the country needs to reduce its expenditure. The difference is that most householders do the reduction with some element of discrimination.

We don’t say: “OK, no food gets bought until the week before Christmas.” We eat leftovers we would, in the boom years, have thrown out. We don’t take the sell-by date as the eat-by date. We find jars or cans at the back of cupboards (much the way the Department of Finance found that little bit of lost cash last week) and we concoct something edible out of them. We usually stop short, however, of ceasing completely to buy food as a way of solving our financial problems.

While we, as individual citizens, adopt a nuanced approach, the state is rather more radical, not to say brutal.

Take the current ban on recruitment within the civil and public service. It has a lot going for it. It also has its downsides. It’s the management equivalent of doing facials with a Brillo pad: dirt-cheap, extremely bracing, but of limited long-term use, since each of us gets only so many layers of skin.

The first thing that’s wrong with the present ban on recruitment is that it doesn’t address, at all, the ghost estates within some state bodies. Rumour has it that the HSE has a substantial cadre of highly-paid lads (and lassies) who either sit, unsung and untalked-to, in their reasonably comfortable offices reading newspapers and doing crosswords for the entire week, or who stay at home and just drop in now and then to show willing.

Now, in your role as a card-carrying member of the New Poor, you will say, in a heartless way: “Pity about them”.

You will take it further, indicating that, having lost your job so that you can’t even afford to buy this particular paper and, as a result, are reading this in a public library or have picked up a copy abandoned by an earlier reader, you could live quite happily sitting in a neat warm office in a comfortable chair surfing the web on an HSE computer. This position is understandable.

But the fact is that these ghost managers have worked all their lives. Many of them have come up through the ranks, done extra degrees and learned to work with professionals from all sorts of varied disciplines.

A few years ago, as part of Brendan Drumm’s reform of the health service, they were quite suddenly robbed of function and almost all that goes with it.

They were effectively made redundant without a package. Oh, come on, I hear you say, they’re bloody well paid. That’s true. Bloody well paid, they are, to do the sum total of damn all, each and every working day of the year. I can imagine few less joyful sentences for being found guilty of nothing in particular than to have to pass people you once managed, all of them engaged in tasks, all of them feeling wanted, needed and essential, and, having passed them, to walk to your own office, knowing that none of them is likely to even put a head around the door because it would be so embarrassing. To them. And to you.

I would hope that public expenditure minister Brendan Howlin, when he reconstructs the public service, comes up with some provision to make sense of the present and prevent this kind of cruelty in the future. It’s not harassment. In fact, it’s the apathetic opposite of harassment. At least if you feel you’re being bullied or harassed, the bullies, by their very behaviour, acknowledge that you exist. Many ghost managers do not even have that small consolation. And the ban on public service recruitment clearly has nothing to say about them, one way or the other. How could it? They’ve ceased to exist.

However, the objective of the recruitment ban is not to stop employees existing. It’s to ensure that when, for whatever reason, they cease to exist, they’re not replaced. It’s saving money, and many public service bodies have worked out ways to employ people on contract, so as to effectively outsource the jobs that used to be done by people who have retired and who — because of the ban — cannot be replaced with permanent and pensionable staff. These contracts give bright young graduates short-term opportunities to contribute to each organisation before moving on. Except that a bright young graduate wasn’t in the organisation the last time a disaster happened. They weren’t there when a radical shift in policy was undertaken to deal with a now-forgotten problem.

They’re a bit like a young doctor facing a case of a disease that was nearly eradicated, thanks to vaccines, but which is now recurring because of parents deciding not to vaccinate their children.

Like doctors facing such a strange new (old) disease, the bright young graduates on short-term contracts have no memory of what happened the last time. What did work, back then. What didn’t work. And there may not be anybody in the organisation who can recall the details of that historic challenge.

The preservation of corporate memory, particularly in the public service, is enormously important and almost totally disregarded. That preservation depends on a continuum of personnel, which is one of the disadvantages of the current ban: some organisations are the sum of their deliverables and no more, because they’re operating using a constantly (if not frequently) changing quotient of staff.

WHILE most memory can be electronically stored and summoned at a keystroke, not all memory is so responsive, and no keystroke can match the understanding of an experienced human who can relate the issue directly in front of them to the rest of the wider operation while referring back to past experience. Frederick Taylor’s recent account of the occupation and de-Nazification of post-war Germany makes the point that more than one horrific accident in the Ruhr mines, under Allied rule, was complicated by precisely that lack of experience. The occupiers took out the Nazi mine experts and replaced them with clean newcomers. The latter had neither the time to build up a corporate memory of the idiosyncrasies of specific mines nor access to those who held such memory in their head, and miners died as a result.

The ban on recruitment should not be softened. We’re in too deep a financial hole for that. But there is a case for a small independent body vested with the task of ensuring that the public service is not damaged by the transient commitment of a constantly-changing temporary staff replacing those who take the longer view. Public service reform should be about stripping out, but also about building upon tradition, proven values and corporate memory.