A Bill to transform public service recruitment is a recipe for the politicisation of the Civil Service and will make sure it recruits only "on a wink and a nod" basis, Labour leader Mr Pat Rabbitte has claimed.
He said the Public Service Management (Recruitment and Appointments) Bill, which will localise recruitment for decentralisation, was part of a package of change whose principal purpose was to "copperfasten the hold on office of one political party".
The Dublin South West TD said the development of the Civil Service Commissioners and the Local Appointments Commission had brought an end to the "grace and favour network of patronage" for the appointment of rent and rates collectors, post office officials and a number of different grades in the Civil Service, who all had one thing in common, that "they all belonged to one political party".
But the Civil Service Commission was being dismantled and replaced with a system which once again "will facilitate the development of an underhand and wrongly motivated approach to recruitment in the public service".
The Minister of State, Mr Tom Parlon, who introduced the legislation last month, said it would increase flexibility by allowing public sector bodies to recruit directly as well as through the Civil Service Commissioners and it would allow public bodies to use private recruitment agencies. He said the Bill would also support the decentralisation process, by allowing bodies and Departments to "tailor recruitment to their own needs, a factor which will be particularly important during the decentralisation process itself".
It would also provide a modern and efficient framework for public service recruitment which allowed for increased flexibility while maintaining current high standards of probity.
Mr Rabbitte said, however, that it was a "dangerous and sinister development on a par with many of the other innovations introduced by this arrogant Government", and no other explanation was possible. He claimed the Bill did not even pass the Government's own "Regulating Better" document for improving national competitiveness, and nobody "has yet come forward to explain to this house what precisely they think is wrong with the present structure". Mr Eamon Ryan (Green, Dublin South) said there was deep concern among senior civil servants that the Government intended to introduce a provision whereby its special advisers could get permanent civil service jobs. "The civil servants are deeply fearful for the future independence of the Civil Service, should such a provision be included."
Earlier Mr Michael Ring (FG, Mayo) said the Bill should be withdrawn. He pointed to the Local Government Bill, under which county managers received a derogation which allowed them to pick their own interview boards to select people for appointment and thus "take in whoever they wished from the streets without going through the proper channels". This was now being extended to all jobs.
