Ireland’s Sir Humphreys will resist all attempts at civil service reform
Why the latest public service renewal plan is sure to fail
THERE is a story told about Brian Lenihan Jr, that when he was appointed minister for justice in 2007, he was presented on his arrival in the departmental offices on St Stephen’s Green with a welcome present from his senior civil servants: a box set of the TV show Yes, Minister. It is quite possibly apocryphal. It’s one of those stories, however, that, if not true, should be.
For there is no more accurate picture of the sclerosis that is endemic in the upper echelons of the Irish public service, or of the resistance to change that permeates all the way from departmental secretary general right down to the humblest hall porter, than the classic 1980s BBC comedy series.
The executive floors of departmental offices right across Dublin are full of Sir Humphreys and Bernards, all intent on ensuring that – whatever happens – their own backsides are covered and nothing is done that will rock the departmental boat or threaten, in any way, their own cosy and cossetted existence.
There is a rich irony in the fact that, in the very week that Enda Kenny and Brendan Howlin announced yet another ‘radical overhaul’ of the public service, the Government admitted that it has been unable to find a replacement for Brian Purcell as the €176,000-a-year secretary general of the Department of Justice.
Despite the not-unattractive salary and the toothsome prospect of a giltedged pension, there were no suitable candidates from the private sector – which is where the Government had really hoped to find somebody – or from within the civil service itself.
The truth, of course, is that this is one of those jobs that nobody wants – not because the pay and perks are unsatisfactory but because Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald has made clear that whoever eventually gets it will be expected to implement radical change in a department that is especially notorious for its refusal to contemplate change of any kind.
Prior to the departure of Mr Purcell, an independent consultants’ report had condemned what it described as a ‘closed, secretive, silo-driven culture’ in an organisation with ‘significant leadership and management problems’.
The truth is that the consultants could have been talking about any government department. Despite repeated promises and endless reports, government after government has, time after time, lost out to our own Sir Humphreys.
The only person ever brought into the civil service from the private sector at secretary general level, John Moran of the Department of Finance, announced earlier this year that he is quitting – just 26 months into a seven-year contract. We still do not know precisely why.
WE CAN but speculate, however, that he is doing so because he finds himself repeatedly frustrated by the adamantine resistance to change that he has encountered both within his own department and indeed throughout the entire public service in which he controls – at least in theory – the pursestrings.
It is telling, too, that the new ‘reform’ programme announced this week will have a frontman in the shape of Robert Watt, the talented and ambitious secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure, who is widely regarded as a rising star in the Merrion Street firmament – but no actual leader.
One of the key recommendations of an independent panel chaired by Professor Kevin Rafter of DCU was that there be a new full-time head of the civil service – in other words, somebody to spearhead the programme of change and take responsibility for it.
Instead, we will simply have some sort of a new ‘management board’. The buck, in best Sir Humphrey tradition, will stop not on one man’s desk but with a committee.
And Mr Watt and his peers can slip back into the classic Merrion Street comfort zone: one of power without responsibility. The irony, of course, is that it was Mr Watt, at this summer’s McGill Summer School, who first suggested that public servants who do not measure up to their job should be sacked.
Yet there is nothing in this new Civil Service Renewal Plan – apart from a few platitudes about ‘removing’ staff who are ‘blatantly underperforming’, but only after they have been given every opportunity to improve – to suggest that anything as radical as this is ever going to happen.
In fact, the suggestion is every bit as implausible as Brendan Howlin’s proposal that, instead of rewarding public servants with bonus payments, they might be taken out for a nice lunch and a slap on the back by their superiors.
That, as Mr Howlin himself should know, is not the way the Irish public service works.
Two years ago he announced plans to review more than 1,000 outdated allowances and Spanish practices within the public service, to save the taxpayer €150m a year in the process.
Many of these allowances, such as the Garda boot allowance, have been redundant for decades. Others, such as ‘eating on-site’ allowances of up to €1.90 a day, have been patently unjustifiable from the day they were introduced.
And yet, in the face of a storm of protest from the unions, Mr Howlin eventually scrapped only one – the payment whenever Ireland held the EU presidency of a substantial lump sum, on top of subsistence allowances, to senior civil servants.
Even that, as this newspaper reported earlier this year, was watered down to the point of being almost meaningless.
Earlier this year, justice minister Alan Shatter was effectively sacked by the Taoiseach.
However, when the Government wanted to get rid of the Garda Commissioner, the only way it could do so was to send Mr Purcell out to knock on his home door on a Monday night and politely suggest that he might like to take early retirement.
And when they then wanted to get rid of Mr Purcell himself, they ended up creating a new position for him as ‘head of compliance’ with the HSE, one in which he will continue to enjoy the same €180,000-a-year salary for a job that was hitherto seemingly unnecessary.
Meanwhile, Mr Moran’s pred- ecessor, Kevin Cardiff – the man at the helm when a €3.6bn ‘error’ in calculating our national debt was made – was appointed to, irony of ironies, the EU Court of Auditors.
But the uber-irony of it all is that the reform plan includes a new accountability board, which will be chaired by the Taoiseach himself – the very same man who refused to explain exactly why he felt it necessary to dispatch the aforementioned Mr Purcell to the Garda Commissioner that frenzied night.
Nor will he answer directly the central question over the brazen cronyism involved in the appointment of John McNulty to the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art prior to his nomination as Fine Gael candidate to the Seanad.
Who put his name forward in the first place? Perhaps the chairman of the new accountability board might like to tell us.
The Sir Humphreys of this world, you see, always win.
To quote the man himself, when asked by Minister Jim Hacker whether or not he agreed that the British civil service was over-manned and feather-bedded: ‘Well, minister, if you ask me for a straight answer, then I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn’t very much in it one way or the other. As far as one can see, at this stage.’