Plans to decentralise the Civil Service on the scale envisaged by the Government could proceed only on a "rational and voluntary basis", the leader of the State's main trade union for senior civil servants has warned.
"The Government does not own the Civil Service", said Mr Sean O Riordain, general secretary of the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants. Speaking at the union's annual conference in Dublin at the weekend, he told delegates: "We are not pawns to be moved about for local electoral advantage to the constituency of the minister or minister of state with functional responsibility in departments."
Mr O Riordain called for a Green Paper which would identify economic, social and geographic criteria for assessing decentralisation proposals. He questioned the legal powers of ministers to relocate offices, given that the Public Service Management Act has made secretaries-general responsible for running departments. "What if the secretary-general of a department doesn't think it makes sense to split a department between four or five different locations? Will his views be listened to?"
He also warned that any repeat of Partnership 2000, where some groups were able to secure higher pay increases than others, would lead to the collapse of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness. The need to curb house prices also had to be addressed, or it would be "difficult to see the current social partnership model surviving".
The introduction of the benchmarking process for determining public sector pay might see a return to collective bargaining based on "rationality" rather than industrial power, but Mr O Riordain said that this was a new process and the jury was still out. He predicted that, given the complexities of the issues involved, it might well prove impossible to complete the benchmarking process before the end of the PPF.
He foresaw problems with the new performance management system unveiled for 30,000 civil servants by the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, last Thursday. While the AHCPS supported the proposals in principle, he questioned the "appropriateness of one generic competency model across the Civil Service", given its complexity.