Thousands more civil servants needed to keep up with growth in economy, Eamon Ryan says

Thousands of additional public servants are required because the growth in the size of the economy has not been matched by an increase in the size of the State, Minister for Environment and Transport Eamon Ryan has said.

Local authorities need more staff engaged in engineering, water services, technical planning and the administrative system, and An Bord Pleanála needs more resources, Mr Ryan said, by way of example. Every local authority needs more staff, he added.

Speaking on the Inside Politics podcast with The Irish Times, Mr Ryan said the Government works in partnership with the employers and the unions, as well as with civil society organisations.

“What the employers and the unions are saying, in unison, is that the State needs to be bigger,” Mr Ryan said.

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“The success of our country and the economy, which has seen a massive, almost one million additional people in the workforce, has not been matched by a similar extension in the public service.”

Eamon Ryan: We need to scale up the State to make it fit for purpose

Listen | 53:54

The State has problems, including a housing crisis that is very real, but by any measure Ireland is a “very successful country” with the longest life expectancy in Europe and a Government that introduced socially progressive budgets over the past three years, the Green Party leader said.

The financial crisis may have left a legacy of being “terrified” of budget deficits and there may have been an ideological aversion to running deficits but that has changed, Mr Ryan said. It is now recognised that we need to invest in the public service to deliver what needs to be delivered, he added.

While there are problems with delivery in some areas, the State has delivered a good motorway system and is in the process of becoming one of the most digitally connected countries in the world, so the system is capable of delivering change, Mr Ryan said.

Thousands of new public servants are needed to “scale up our State to match the success of our country”. According to Mr Ryan, it was not the case, as some claimed, that everyone was emigrating.

“Everyone is not emigrating. People are coming into the country in very large numbers, including returning emigrants, and we need to scale up to deal with the increase in population that we are seeing,” he said.

On policies to deal with climate change, Mr Ryan said rural Ireland could “benefit the most from Ireland going green” and that people are going to have to be paid to protect and restore the natural world.

He said the fear of change in rural Ireland was in part due to the fact that it is ill-served by the current system, “particularly farmers, whose growth in income is not matched to the growth in some other parts of the country”.

Referring to recent record operating profit results reported by the Kerry Group, Mr Ryan said “some of that profit needs to go back to protecting nature”.

He said many farmers felt they were not getting their share of the wealth that has developed in Ireland in recent decades. Agriculture needed to change, and the best investment would be “an investment in nature”, Mr Ryan said.

The comments came as members of Macra na Feirme marched 79km from Athy to Government buildings to highlight issues facing young farmers and rural Ireland as a whole, meeting Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue to present their proposals.

Shane Dolphin (23), one of the young farmer group’s representatives, told The Irish Times the “Green Party might get a bit of an awakening” at the next election due to its policies on rural Ireland, but called on all Coalition partners to address their concerns.