THE CROKE Park pay deal was “only one piece of jigsaw” in the process of changing the way the State was administered, Minister of State for Public Service Transformation, Dara Calleary has said.
Now that the deal was ratified, the challenge was to implement it on the ground and that work was under way, Mr Calleary told the MacGill Summer School yesterday.
He said the public service was seen at its best in the efficient and committed response of Garda, rescue and hospital personnel to the recent road tragedy at Inishowen where eight people died.
What was the public service going to do in the context of reduced resources in the years ahead? Ireland was good at creating agencies but, once they ran out of steam, “we’re not so good at de-creating them”.
There were private sector approaches that worked and could be applied in the public sector.
“The days for consulting and talking are gone: we need to implement the change.” The deal provided certainties, but also “a road map for change”. One of the most frustrating things about being a public representative was finding blockages in public service demand in some areas whereas others were underused.
There had been seven-month delays in redundancy payments, but getting staff from other departments was extremely difficult and he hoped that under the Croke Park deal this would change.
Responding to criticisms of politicians from the floor, Mr Calleary distanced himself from Senator Ivor Callely who, he said, had “done the profession of politics no service”.
Chairman of the National Competitiveness Council and former head of the Higher Education Authority, Don Thornhill told the summer school there should be no more trading off of pay increases for promises of increased productivity. There had to be zero tolerance for restrictive practices which were “a form of blackmail of society”.
There should be a concept of “noble purpose” about the public service, but this had been diminished by, for example, the so-called decentralisation programme.
General secretary of the Civil Public and Services Union, Blair Horan said the OECD benchmarked the Irish public service against other countries and showed that the Irish public sector “does not perform too badly”.
With regard to the Croke Park deal, the unions would be looking to restore the pay cuts of recent years. But there was also a basis there for transforming the public service.
“It won’t be easy,” he said. The Civil Service was hierarchical and did not deal with change as quickly as perhaps it should.
Nearly all the staffing increases in the Civil Service were at the more senior end. He added: “I don’t accept that benchmarking is somehow the evil that has been presented in media terms.”
With the Croke Park deal, there was “some light at the end of the tunnel” and he was confident the trade union movement would play its full part in resolving the crisis.
Labour TD Seán Sherlock said: “We need public services which are cost-effective.” They must be accountable “to a level never seen before”.
Public service leaders needed to understand that bonuses were a reward for achievement and not just turning up on the day.
Ireland should aim to have a world-class public service so that people knew when they handed over their taxes that they were getting value for money.
Asking people to change when they had seen their salaries and the funding for their departments and agencies being cut was a “big ask” and morale was “quite low at the moment”.
