I move the adjournment.
PRIVATE DEPUTIES' BUSINESS. - ADJOURNMENT DEBATE—POST OFFICE PROMOTIONS.
I gave notice, at question time, that I intended to raise a matter on the adjournment, and that matter is one which very seriously concerns the Irish postal service. In the past three weeks three of the most extraordinary promotions that have ever been made in the history of the Irish Post Office have been made. Three officers have been promoted from other offices into the Dublin postal district, to high supervising positions, over the heads of senior, qualified officers, serving in the latter district. This matter is one which has caused very, very serious indignation and very, very serious disgust in the Irish postal service. One of the persons promoted happens to be a brother of the Minister, another happens to be the Minister's Private Secretary, and the third happens to be a person named Waldron, who has no record of able service which would entitle him to this extraordinary promotion. The seriousness of this matter to the Irish postal service and the indignation which the promotions have caused are the reasons which compel me to raise this matter in this House and to enter my protest, on behalf of the Dublin postal staff in particular, against these extraordinary promotions. I must say to the Dublin postal staff, and to me personally, these promotions bear the hall-mark of favouritism. These promotions indicate, in my opinion, and in the opinion of the Dublin postal staff, that this administration of ours is not free from that evil which in the past political period this country was always prone to be charged with. In the past, it is true, many glaring cases of favouritism occurred under the British administration. The record of the Irish postal service, in particular as far as these three promotions are concerned, shows that they have nothing to learn from the British administration in the matter of the favouritism evil. I cannot see any justification, the Dublin postal staff cannot see any justification, and I venture to say that an impartial Committee could find no justification for the special selection of these three officers. There are in the Dublin postal district to-day senior qualified officers, with long service and high qualifications and of unblemished character, well qualified to fill the three posts which have been filled by importations. In reply to my question to-day, the Minister appears to have discovered that there was no officer in the Dublin postal district who could have been promoted to any of these posts, no officer in the Dublin postal district who had sufficient qualification to be appointed to any of these posts. That contention will convince nobody who knows the position. That contention will not convince anybody who knows the staff of the Dublin postal district. That contention will not convince any fair-minded body of people. That contention is not the contention of a person who definitely set out to find that there were qualified persons in the Dublin postal district.
There are well qualified persons in the Dublin postal district who would fill these jobs in a more creditable manner than the three people who have been promoted. What can be said for the promotion of these officers? What can be said for the extraordinary course which has been taken in appointing three officers from other offices, bringing them into the Dublin postal district, and promoting them to high supervising posts? It is quite an abnormal procedure. The normal procedure, although there may have been one or two exceptions, is for the higher administrative posts to be given to the staff employed in that office. That practice was not followed on this occasion. It was not merely over-ruled in one instance but was over-ruled in three instances in the short period of three or four weeks. Whatever case may be made for the Minister's Private Secretary—and I think, perhaps, the best case can be made for that officer— I do not think any case whatever can be made for the promotion of the other two officers. They have absolutely no experience of the work on which they are employed. They have neither administrative nor supervising experience and, not even in their initial basic training would they give hopes of ultimately becoming fitted for these posts.
The proposal is to employ them on work calling for considerable tact and ability, to employ them in a department where parcels are opened for Customs examination, and where very careful supervising and administrative officers are required. As proof of the inability of one of them to fill the position to which he has been appointed, I want to mention that he suggested the other day that more Customs parcels should be opened at one time. If that suggestion were carried out it would mean messing the table with contents of parcels and, apparently, it would not matter if a man expecting hats got boots, and a man expecting boots got hats. If that is the type of ability required for these posts, the public have my sympathy as regards the contents of any parcel they may receive in future. It seems to me, especially as we are approaching the end of the lifetime of this Dáil, and, perhaps, the end of the Ministry which has continued in office here for four years, that this looks like an attempt to place people before the Ministry goes out of power. Within a short period of three weeks, on the eve of a general election, these extraordinary promotions are made and the Dublin postal staff and, I think, every fair-minded person will require a good deal of persuasion to believe that these abnormal, hasty, and irresponsibly-considered promotions would have been made if the Government were not on the eve of going to the country, and, perhaps, going out of office.
These promotions are unjust, not merely to senior officers capable of filling posts in the Dublin postal district, but to redundant officers in that district. The only hope which these redundant officers have is that by the occurrence of vacancies they will be absorbed in other posts. This new departure is going to close an avenue of absorption to these people. If that policy is going to continue it means that 80 or 90 people in the Dublin postal district are going to find themselves face to face with a stone wall. It seems to me that, in making these three promotions and in the haste with which they were made, the Post Office administration appears to have lost not only its head, but its soul. I think that the definite effect of this policy will be to swell the pension list and to drive more men out of the service, because they feel that they cannot get justice in it. A bad day's work has been done for the service by these promotions, and I feel sure that the service will suffer for many and many a day because of the unjust way in which it has been treated on this occasion.
I think the Deputy can be congratulated on having made the most of his material in this particular instance. He is, no doubt, aware, as an old Post Office official, that the one black spot on the Irish postal service for the last thirty years has been the Dublin postal district. Those members of the Dáil who may not understand the complications of postal work should know that this particular district deals with purely postal work, apart from telegraphs and telephones or anything else, and it is the key position through which the major part of the communications of this State pass. Because of that position, it is of vital importance to the administration here to see that it runs with a smoothness and efficiency beyond question. During the last twenty-five or thirty years of British administration this particular section practically ran itself. The men were the controllers, not the controlled. In a weak moment in the British administration this staff got completely out of hand, and, notwithstanding several efforts on the part of the authorities at the time to bring it back to some state of discipline, notwithstanding the introduction at intervals of the best material that could be found outside, they never seemed to have succeeded in doing so, with the result that, scarcely had we taken over the administration, when a strike, specially organised and directed from this particular section, was precipitated.
That was our first experience of this particular section which now pretends to have a grievance. Consequent upon that strike, and as a result of a Commission of Inquiry into Post Office wages, it was found that much of the work which these sorters were then performing could be done by postmen and, as a consequence, of the 390 sorters in the section at that particular time only 69 remain unpromoted to-day. Those 69 men are officers of very short service in the Dublin postal district. I venture to say, from the point of view of grievance, that never in the history of the Civil Service in this country has there been such extensive promotion as in this part of our service, nor in any other part of the postal service have there been promotions approaching in any regard to those in this section. Sixty-nine remain unpromoted after a period of five years' administration out of 390. That is unprecedented in the Civil Service of, possibly, any country. It is due to the fact that a great many of the men doing postal work could find more suitable employment in other departments of the Civil Service, and their promotion to those departments would be of great advantage to the State.
For my own part, it is no secret to say that I strongly supported that view, and was in a large measure responsible for many of these men finding outlets elsewhere. I hoped, as a consequence of the changes which took place as a result of these promotions, that the spirit of indiscipline which actuated this small section would have been dissipated and, in order to make doubly sure, I brought in a couple of years ago what I considered to be three of the best outside men I could find. Last year, however, rumours reached me and reached headquarters that all was not well in the Dublin postal district. We decided that a special investigation was necessary, an unusual thing in my Department. Officers were set aside for this purpose, one of them being the Assistant Principal Clerk at the headquarters establishment, the other being the Chief Establishment Officer. Both men, in my opinion, are highly capable and conscientious officials. They made an exhaustive inquiry into the working of this section, and here, in brief, is the introduction to their report. It is a very long report, which I will not weary the House by reading. Here is their introduction to it:
"In supervision there is a general weakness and inactivity, some incompetency, much neglect. There is no evidence of the essential requirements in control, no evidence of any real effort to give effect to the Department's policy or Postal Department requirements. There is a want of direction about the higher control and the Junior Supervisors do not understand what is required of them. They do not even know the numbers of staff under their charge. There is clear evidence that even an ordinary effort has not been made to take the obvious and necessary methods towards the maintenance of these fundamentals."
In the course of their investigations they discovered that, notwithstanding the repeated efforts that they had made from headquarters to bring about efficiency and economy in this part of the service, in common with all other parts of the service, in one section alone where 101 officers had been employed, 25 were found to be unnecessary. They also found that there was a serious absence of punctuality. They found that in the transfer of moneys there was no real effort made at checking. They found, in fact, that the staff controlled by these gentlemen, who, apparently, have a grievance, made no serious effort to do its work in accordance with our instructions; that, in fact, it was the one section in the whole service, a service employing practically anything up to 21,000 people, which refused to carry its weight.
Fortunately for us, this state of affairs was not permitted to continue very long. The headquarters staff is a very vigilant one. Lapses of this kind are very quickly pounced on, and these serious delinquencies were put right. But so little confidence had we in the ability of the existing command to tackle that situation, that its control was passed over to two high officials from the Secretary's Office, a control which continued until new appointments were made, one of these being the Postmaster of Cork, who was put in complete charge and who is now the Comptroller of Dublin. I have merely touched on the irregularities which prevailed in this service, but I have here from the most reliable men an indictment which surprised even those who were fully cognisant of the ability of this particular section of the staff to cause trouble.
I have been sometimes accused of wasting public moneys. I notice that has been stated in one or two instances in the country. I want to say that without any pressure from the Minister for Finance or the Government generally I have taken the most extreme steps to economise, to make this section of the service a commercial section run by the Government as a model of what employment should be, as a model of what the public should expect in the expenditure of their money. As a result—and I have had to fight my corner in doing it—I have effected, over a period of three years, in a total expenditure of less than two and a half millions, an annual saving of £800,000. That, I venture to say, is an achievement which many people will reluctantly give me credit for. But it is because of the steps that I have taken, the hard process of forcing men to give the last ounce of their effort to this service, that I have effected these results.
I do not promote men for friendship's sake. I know no friend, either in politics or outside. That, at any rate, has been one of my characteristics. But when it came to a question of charging people with the responsibility of putting a section of the service which has caused endless trouble in the past, and which is capable of causing it in the future, on a basis which would do credit to the service, I had no reluctance in doing so. The officers suggested here were not the only officers I had in mind, but they were the only ones who were prepared to venture on a very thankless responsibility. They are capable men, and the Deputy knows that as well as I do. The opposition to their appointment is because of their capability, and for no other reason. One of them, Mr. Waldron, the most junior of the lot, is the most objectionable, apparently. I venture to say he is the most efficient also. In the case of my own private secretary, Mr. McMenamin, who has had no promotion during my connection with the service, many members of the House can say whether or not they regard him as efficient. In the case of the third, the Postmaster at Blackrock, I do not intend to dwell on any qualifications of his. We are merely accepting the fact that he was the organiser of the forces which remained loyal to the Post Office during the strike. His basic salary in Blackrock was £4 4s. a week; his present salary is £5. Mr. McMenamin, I should have said, accepted the position reluctantly. It means an immediate loss of £100 per year in his earnings.
In the case of Blackrock it is intended to reduce the Post Office to a lower grade and have it controlled from Dun Laoghaire. In that way we expect to effect a saving. We have either to run public services on efficient lines or we have not. If we choose the latter course it may be the easier for those responsible. It is sometimes hard to take steps such as I have taken here, such as I took two years ago and such as the British took in their time on several occasions; but when it is a matter of effecting efficiency and economy in the public service I have never once considered shifting my responsibility. I do claim that as regards the steps I have taken in Post Office administration in this country since I took over the service—and I took over anything but a disciplined service—I am satisfied that my judgment requires no recantation.
I have no apology whatever to make for these appointments. I have made them deliberately and in the interests of the service. I say further that I had seriously considered, not the question of the promotion of any of these supervisors, but the question of de-grading them. If their lack of loyalty to their paymasters, the public, does not undergo a serious alteration, and if I am still connected with this service, I certainly shall deem it my duty to take very extreme steps to deal with many of them. They are not in here for the good of their health. Their duty is to give a return to the public, and they have not given that return, notwithstanding very liberal treatment on my part, and, sooner or later, they will find results different from what have been in evidence up to date.
The Dáil adjourned at 8.45 p.m. until Thursday, 5th May, at 3 p.m.