Transferees may unlock puzzle of decentralisation

Business Opinion: Dermot McCarthy is not a man given to making a lot of public pronouncements. So when the State's most senior civil servant tells a public forum something should happen, people generally pay attention.

When the secretary general to the Government and the Department of the Taoiseach then goes to the trouble of repeating himself at another public forum a few months later, it is wise to presume he is planning something.

If the Taoiseach says the same thing as his most senior civil servants less than 24 hours later then it assumes the status of policy.

We are talking here about the recruitment of managers from the private sector into the Civil Service. McCarthy first raised this issue last October at the Dublin Economics Workshop, (which for reasons too prosaic to go into is always held in Kenmare, Co Kerry).

It resurfaced last Thursday in a panel debate involving McCarthy at the Irish Management Institute annual conference in Druids Glen. McCarthy called for two-way movement between the public and private sectors to improve the level of expertise in certain areas. He also pointed out that provisions to allow such recruitment were already in place.

On Friday morning the Taoiseach told the same conference that he supported "more flexibility to recruit specialist project managers" along with "more professionalisation and specialised training of public servants".

When you boil all this down, it seems likely that there will be some sort of initiative in this direction in the near future. The various bodies representing senior civil servants have yet to make their views known, but one suspects that McCarthy will have a job on his hands convincing them that it is such a good idea.

Assuming he does get them on board, then the next issue is convincing anybody pursuing a successful career in the private sector that its a wise move to transfer into the Civil Service.

There is a long, but discrete, tradition of senior personnel from the big accountancy firms being seconded to Government departments, particularly the old department of public enterprise, which followed on from the department of transport, energy and communications.

Amongst the members of this select club are Brian Dunne who, after his stint in the department on secondment from one of the large accountancy firms, went back into the private sector and via Aer Lingus is now the number two at the holding company for Air Canada.

But what made this system work was that the accountancy firms continued to pay the individuals' wages and the net cost to the Department was negligible. From the accountancy firms' point of view it was money well spent, given the contacts the individual would make and insight they would gain into the working of the Government and State companies.

In addition the positions they occupied - while real and in one case as a de facto chef de cabinet - were supernumerary and temporary. Thus no senior civil servant lost his or her place on the promotion ladder.

What McCarthy seems to be proposing is quite different. Taken at face value he is talking about middle-ranking professionals in areas such as project management or accounting systems opting to become civil servants. He does not appear to be talking about people with specific skills being seconded for a year or two on a project basis.

And it would not just be anybody with these skills that the Civil Service would be looking to recruit; it would be people with a rare enough blend of real commercial experience and the ability to work and manage in a large organisation with a strong institutional culture. The last thing McCarthy wants, one suspects, is a bevy of 30-somethings with freshly minted MBAs running amok in the Civil Service banging on about business process re-engineering.

In fact the most obvious recruiting ground would be the large banks. But it is hard to see them being enticed by the lure of a career in the Civil Service, notwithstanding the recent benchmarking awards.

McCarthy may end up looking closer to home for the people to beef up the Civil Service, namely in the State companies and various commercial State agencies.

Few could deny that the ESB, for example, has the sort of project management skills the Government says it needs. Equally the National Roads Authority, for all the mistakes it may have made in the past, has considerable expertise at this stage.

The idea of transferring into the permanent Civil Service could well be attractive to people working in these organisations and vice versa. In fact it has already been suggested in some quarters that allowing this to happen could well prove the key to unlocking what is perhaps the biggest puzzle McCarthy faces: how to make decentralisation work.