New civil service role would be waste of time

According to the principal recommendations in the recently published report on civil service accountability and performance, a newly created position of Head of the Civil Service is set to be created by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to act as guardian of the ethos and values of the system.

The head would report to a board of experts, including the now obligatory member, recruited from outside the State, who would be expected to provide the civil service with ‘an outside perspective’. Yes minister, but is this a tacit admission that the existing regimes within the Departments of Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform do not have the credibility and legitimacy to lead and deliver fundamental change?

This report does not describe a single concrete example of reform successfully accomplished by either the civil service, or a major semi-State agency, yet root-and-branch modernising change has been on the programme of every government since 1994. The last major reform initiative, the decentralisation of the public sector outside Dublin, conjured alongside the now abandoned national spatial strategy, cost well over €300 million, not the €20 million promised in 2003. That is a vivid example of a chaotic, fitful and poorly considered undertaking which delivered nothing, but unwanted State-owned vacant building sites in isolated locations.