05.21.07

Marc Coleman on Public Servants

Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 9:39 pm by Sarah

I like Marc Coleman’s pieces in the IT – used to know him in TCD btw. This opinion column today in the IT starts out making a point with which I totally agree – that public servants should take responsibility for mismanagement in the public service. Pat Rabbitte’s defence of public servants sparked the column and that’s fair enough. What I don’t get (other than his personal party preference) is why Marc devotes so much time to patronising Rabbitte and failing to point out the rather obvious fact that FF hardly have a sparkling history of making public servants accountable. When did anyone get fired for a f*ck-up?

Michael Kelly from the Dept of Health got moved sideways after the nursing home scandal. Ministers sat in on meetings where that was flagged and they ignored it and quite frankly, that was one case where there SHOULD have been political accountability. But in the last ten years, is that it? One guy who took the blame while his Ministers avoided any?

How can Coleman write an article condemning Pat Rabitte for his view that public servants shouldn’t be fired and not mention the fact that FF haven’t fired ANYONE in the last ten years? He’s just using the space to bash Labour over the head for saying how they would behave in office while ignoring how FF have actually behaved in office. Bizarre.

“Should accountability for the performance of more than one-third of a million people employed in the public service boil down to the sacking of government ministers alone? The question has an important backdrop, that of benchmarking public-sector pay.

Already in 2002 the average public servant was paid 40 per cent more than the average private-sector worker. Public-sector pensions are widely regarded as “to die for”, while the nurses’ request for a 35-hour week illustrates just how different reality is for public-sector workers. Given such conditions – and given that private-sector workers pay for them – Pat Rabbitte was asked whether public servants found guilty of incompetence should be sacked.

His answer was honest and unequivocal: “I do not agree with the proposition that what is required is the sacking of incompetent public servants”.

Justifying the answer, Rabbitte spoke of the “long traditions” of the public service. Traditions whereby ministers took ultimate responsibility for the mistakes of public servants.

It was precisely those traditions that were called on last week by both Labour and Fine Gael. Dick Roche, they argued, should be sacked for the debacle over the contamination of water supplies in Galway and Martin Cullen over the state of the transport system.

In a general election campaign an opposition politician is, of course, entitled to make such an argument. But what does making this argument reflect about the understanding of government, and the complexities of government, on the part of the person making it?

The context of Pat Rabbitte’s response to the question put to him was a question posed by another newspaper over the Travers report into the scandal of nursing-home charges.

That report, although not blaming the former secretary of the department of health Michael Kelly, stated that an insufficiently detailed report given by him to Cabinet had contributed to the situation which arose. According to the Labour leader, Kelly had been scapegoated.

Without entering into that sensitive issue, the question needs to be asked: are there any circumstances under which public servants can be sacked?

Despite repeated questioning, Rabbitte felt this was not the answer to the problem of waste in the public sector. When the question was put to Fine Gael, a spokesperson for the party said that while of course existing disciplinary machinery within the public service could be used to do so, Fine Gael had no agenda to pursue such a course of action.

But the reality is that Dick Roche did not poison Galway’s water supply. Nor did Martin Cullen call into being the complex array of stakeholders who for decades have defeated all attempts to make Ireland’s public transport system efficient. Both men are temporary holders of office which afford even the longest-serving of their occupants barely enough time to grasp their brief, never mind envisage or implement change.

In their efforts to personalise issues of ministerial accountability, Fine Gael and Labour failed to grasp this point last week.

Of course, ministers must be held to account. Of course the cost overruns cited by the Labour Party last week are, mostly, real. However, a system of policy decision-making that reduces the question of government efficiency to the sacking of one minister has had its day.

As Pat Rabbitte said last week in relation to the Estimates procedure – by which government spending is allocated on an annual basis – it stems from the 19th century and is long overdue for reform.

So is the view that highly-paid public servants can any longer remain immune from accountability, no matter how incompetent they are or how irresponsible their actions.”…bla bla

Permalink