The public service: Not fit for purpose or unfairly maligned?

During a career that has seen him serve as a cabinet minister five times and a TD for a Dublin constituency for decades, Fine Gael’s Richard Bruton has seen the best and the worst of the public service.

He quickly dismisses the calls of some that “a gung-ho wizard” such as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair should be sent in to eliminate the red tape and waste that exists in the civil service.

“That’s nuts,” says Bruton, chairman of the Fine Gael parliamentary party, “It’s not about taking in private sector gurus and thinking that if the head of Ryanair was running the health service, we’d all be home and hosed.”

The civil service, often derided as a permanent government of paper shufflers, is in the news after Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald claimed it was in the grip of constipation and that her party would spur it into speedy action. “We have, in many respects, a system that is constipated, a system that is slow, and a system that needs to be jolted into more efficient actions,” she told the Irish Examiner.

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The clear implication is that the system knows well what it needs to do but simply cannot, a symptom of paralysis that McDonald claims she would tackle with “very sharp focus” if she gets to wield power on Merrion Street.

However, Ministers were quick – too quick in the eyes of some – to defend civil and public servants, a powerful 356,000-strong constituency in their own right, comprising 15 per cent of the total workforce.

Minister for Public Expenditure Michael McGrath accused McDonald of “tarring” the service with one brush, saying it was “unwarranted and unjustified criticism from someone who is offering herself as a potential taoiseach”.

The departments tend to be very focused a lot of the time on what's happening in the Dáil. The focus there is very much on the immediate crisis for the day

But even people who have worked at the very highest levels accept it rarely runs as smoothly as they would wish. “The urgent replaces the important,” says one battle-hardened veteran, bemoaning the lack of long-term planning.

“We have a political elite which is quite short-term and quite parochial in its thinking,” he says, recalling secretaries-general scrambling to respond to political issues bearing down on ministers and playing out on Twitter.

“The departments tend to be very focused a lot of the time on what’s happening in the Dáil. The focus there is very much on the immediate crisis for the day.”

Senior civil servants and some of McDonald’s political opponents see her intervention as an easy, populist, Donald Trump-style attack, mirroring his “drain the swamp” pledges before he arrived in Washington.

Today, the Government spends more than ever on public service pay and pensions, with more people employed in the sector than ever before. And their working hours are about to shorten, heralding the end of post-crash sacrifices.

However, as austerity measures finally come to an end and in the light of extraordinary State interventions during the Covid crisis, questions abound.

Is the civil service fit for purpose in the 21st century? Is it equipped to face the challenges that are likely to be shaped profoundly by climate change and the political consequences that flow from it?

Is the machinery of government fine-tuned to deal with rapid technological advances that change the way people live? And what if surging tax revenues evaporate?

“It’s great to be collecting the huge amounts of money we are collecting but it has risen incredibly fast. The risk is that it could fall at a similar rate,” says Séamus Coffey, University College Cork economist and former chairman of budget watchdog the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council.

Vital role

Ireland’s civil and public services have played a vital role over decades in many of the changes have transformed the Irish State, from the high joblessness of the past and forced emigration to free secondary education.

Then there has been the growth of third-level education, European Union membership and the Northern Irish peace process – civil servants played vital roles in all.

Despite glaring weaknesses that led to the banking crash and the humiliating international bailout that followed it, full employment was eventually restored, with more than two million people in jobs.

Though many of the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions were controversial, the crisis demonstrated that the civil and public service could respond with agility and flexibility in the face of crisis.

Nevertheless, huge challenges persist, including health, housing, the electricity challenges that threaten future economic development and the cyber attack on the health service that exposed huge security gaps.

“There is no doubt that on housing and to an extent health, the system has not responded with the kind of scale and radicalism that’s needed and there’s no doubt that there are systemic problems in both,” says a senior civil servant.

"At senior levels they're intellectually good. But the problem is that they can think up so many ways of preventing you doing what you want to do"

By now, says one former minister, it is clear that the Government should have applied the Covid-19 lessons that bureaucratic barriers can “be torn down” overnight when it is necessary to do so.

“Government as a whole can only seem to deal with one big thing at a time,” the former minister says, citing all-hands-on-deck efforts to contain the fallout from shocks such as Brexit and Covid-19.

“If we were taking housing seriously, there would be a Taoiseach-led housing committee meeting every week.”

Another former minister, who served in a Fine Gael-Labour coalition, laments the slow pace of decision-making when there is no emergency. “There’s so many hurdles to get over before you can get anything done that it’s very hard to get anything done,” he says.

“At senior levels they’re intellectually good. But the problem is that they can think up so many ways of preventing you doing what you want to do, some of them good reasons.

“When rubber hits road and you want to get something done, it really has to get done from the [Department of the Taoiseach]. When [taoisigh] get interested, that’s the one department that can knock heads together and get speedy. But you can’t run through [taoisigh] for everything.”

Moreover, massive overruns and long delays on a succession of big public projects point to serious deficiencies when it comes to the control of public expenditure.

“Departments are not good at dealing with big numbers and complex procedures,” says another veteran of civil service battles.

“There’s good and there’s bad. It can be remarkably mixed. It can even be mixed in the same institution. At the broadest level, the price of an honest civil service is a risk-averse and unimaginative civil service.”

Who’s accountable?

All of this raises questions about the quality of individual officials and accountability.

“You have some really good, top-class people in Taoiseach, Finance, Foreign Affairs and [Public Expenditure and Reform],” says one close observer. “Quality is weaker in line departments. Quality people tend to be in more elite departments. The quality is not as strong as you go along.”

Insiders say forthright figures such as Martin Fraser, chief of the Department of An Taoiseach, and Robert Watt, head of the Department of Health, rank in their influence alongside dynamic figures of a bygone years such as Pádraig Ó hUiginn, Paddy Teahon and Dermot Gallagher.

"There are too many people getting promotions too early," says another senior civil servant, who complains of "duffers" and "spanners" in some key posts

Although the British and French systems have the reputation of narrow recruitment from elite schools such as Eton and the former École Nationale d’Administration, some officials say the Irish system has not changed radically from the time when many high flyers started off at Christian Brothers schools. “There’s still a huge amount of people who joined after school and made their way up at night. It’s not Eton. It’s not that kind of thing,” says one senior official.

“The relationship with the politicians is probably more equal than it was before: they’re not all teachers. I think there’s probably an understanding among the civil servants that the politician’s life is even more difficult than it was before because of the internet and 24-hour news.”

But insiders still point to problems with the recruitment of generalists, some of whom move up the ranks too early before gaining real sectoral expertise.

“There is a big issue around mobility – too much movement. There are too many people getting promotions too early,” says another senior civil servant, who complains of “duffers” and “spanners” in some key posts. “People change departments much more frequently. We’ve probably got that wrong. You’d like to have a bit more grey hair, a bit more longevity, more stability.”

Bruton says he has never been in a situation where he did not trust ministerial advice. But he is still concerned about resistance to performance accountability and adds that strategic policy evaluation has been “seriously undervalued” in the public service.

“We don’t do anything like enough of that, and even where you try to create space within departments to do that, it continually gets eroded.”

Still, he notes moves away from the “monastic” system of the past in which junior civil servants joined at 18 and stayed for the entirety of their working lives, some eventually became “the abbot” in charge. “They’re bringing in more outsiders,” he says. “But they tend to be further down. They’re not at the top.”

Indeed, recent Institute of Public Administration research shows that the proportion of top-level appointments filled from within the civil service has been rising overall since the dark days of the bailout a decade ago. “Applicants from within the civil service are currently filling nearly all top-level civil service posts,” says the Public Sector Trends report from December 2021 .

“The proportion of top-level posts filled by private sector applicants reached a high of 21 per cent in 2012 but has been lower each year since then,” it adds.

“In 2020, 100 per cent of successful top-level appointments were filled from within the civil service. This despite more than 70 per cent of all applicants coming from outside the civil service, with more than 50 per cent coming from the private sector.”

Distrust of outsiders

A high-level civil servant in a big department says: “The idea of people coming in from the private sector is a negative in the civil service. They don’t like that.

“There is a clash. But what the clash is really about is that in the private sector, you’re allowed make mistakes. Nobody likes them but you’re allowed to make them. But in the civil service, everybody is afraid of making a mistake because they get carried around with you. It fosters conservatism.”

The irony is that many critics in the political world and outside the public service are quick to say the administration could learn much from private sector practices and the rigours of the open market. “The government needs to have around it an inner cabinet group from the private sector to deliver the minister’s agenda,” says one former minister.

Still, the Public Sector Trends report found that many in the business world don’t see Irish administration as being tangled up in red tape. “The private sector doesn’t see it that way,” says Dr John O’Neill, head of research at the Institute of Public Administration.

“Compared to most European countries in the EU, bureaucracy in Ireland is seen as less of a hindrance to business activity,” the IPA report says, citing a survey by IMD business school in Switzerland.

Bruton says Ireland's administration has a difficulty with challenges that require a response across multiple silos

Some see the contrasts drawn between the private and public sectors as a false argument. Another civil servant says: “The problems of large organisations are the problems of large organisations. Are you telling me there’s nobody in Bank of Ireland or AIB whose performance couldn’t improve?”

Prof Kevin Rafter of Dublin City University, chairman of an independent group on civil service reform in 2014, says generalisations are crude. “We’re not badly served by the civil service. There are parts of it which are not efficient. There are parts of it which are hugely efficient,” he says.

“The idea of ‘private sector good’ and ‘public sector bad’ is old-fashioned and out of date. We need to move away from that. Look at the banking crisis. Try to get through to a utility company on the phone.

“In terms of non-performing staff, Irish law makes it difficult. It’s as difficult in the private sector as the public sector to get rid of people who are not doing their job. But private companies have one benefit: they can write a cheque.”

The civil service has many ways of disappearing laggards into non-jobs without sacking them. But mistakes can prove costly in other ways, with officials conscious more than ever of the risk of a full-frontal political attack at an Oireachtas committee. After bruising confrontations at the Public Accounts Committee, many came to see it as something of a star chamber.

“The culture in Leinster House that public servants are just there to be destroyed to get me on the 6 o’clock news, that’s something that all public servants worry about. That makes the job harder and Mary Lou [McDonald] is at the heart of that,” says one civil servant, echoing views expressed by others.

Is the system ready for climate breakdown? Bruton says Ireland’s administration has a difficulty with challenges that require a response across multiple silos. “They find that difficult to achieve,” he says.

“Something like climate change has certainly exposed that. You can see that agricultural interests think a certain way, transport interests think a certain way. They find it hard to step back out and look at the overall challenge together.”

For another former minister, this spells trouble. “Decision-making can be really slow. Cross-departmental responsibility means nothing will happen. There’s no chance.”

Doing nothing is hardly an option. But a titanic task looms.