I move that the Bill be now read a Second Time. The object of this Bill is to enable established, i.e., permanent and pensionable, status to be conferred upon the forester staff of my Department without the necessity for the holding of a competition by the Civil Service Commissioners under the Civil Service Regulation Acts. I feel sure that Deputies on all sides of the House will welcome the measure, and I do not think I need speak at length in support of it.
Before the administration of forestry in Ireland became the responsibility of a native Government there was a scheme afoot to grant pensionable status to at least a proportion of theforester staff of the British Forestry Commission. The scheme had not reached finality, however, at the time of the change of Government, and the matter was not pursued in the case of the Irish forestry service. The question has been the subject of long standing and pressing representations from the forester staff. Their claim has always had the full sympathy of my Department, but various difficulties of a general nature precluded a favourable decision in the past.
There are at present 163 foresters serving in the Department and of these only one has the pensionable status and degree of permanence which is enjoyed by established civil servants. The exception I have mentioned is one officer remaining from a small group whose cases were dealt with under Section 12 of the Agriculture Act, 1931, as having had reckonable service remunerated out of some of the special funds mentioned in that section. The employment of a forester is essentially permanent in character. Once a forest is established there will always be need for a forester to take charge of its management. Even if the forester who supervised the initial planting were a young man he could not hope to see the first crop reach maturity before he passed the normal age for retirement. In such circumstances it is anomalous that the forester staff should be employed in a temporary capacity and denied any hope of enjoying a pension on retirement.
When the decision was taken last year to grant established status to the foresters it was felt that the normal procedure of establishment by competition held under the Civil Service Regulation Acts would not be appropriate for a variety of reasons. Since no future need for contraction of staff could be foreseen there was no reason for confining the benefits of establishment to a proportion of the forester staff and retaining the remainder on a temporary basis to provide against a future reduction in total numbers. There was therefore no question of selecting only the best qualified and most suitable officers for establishment and no real competitive requirement to be fulfilled. Nor was there anyissue to be determined as to the standard of qualification of the officers affected. Forestry development in this country is almost entirely the concern of the State and there are scarcely any opportunities outside the State Service for acquiring a good knowledge and experience of large-scale forestry work. My Department's forester staff requirements normally have to be met by teaching and training suitable candidates at the State Forestry School. Most of the present forester staff were so trained.
They are all qualified and experienced officers already engaged on the work, and there is no need to test their qualifications and suitability for established forester posts by the holding of an examination. In these circumstances establishment by way of a competition held by the Civil Service Commissioners would have been a futile and time-wasting procedure. To give some appearance of real competition it would have been necessary to announce a limited number of vacancies but from the outset it would have been the intention to extend the successful list to include all candidates who qualified. There were, furthermore, some technical difficulties in the way of the holding of a competition as, for example, the complications arising from the fact that four separate grades of forester were in question. In effect, the situation was one which the Civil Service Regulation Acts were not designed to meet, and the Government felt that in this case rather than render a formal lip-service to the procedure ordained by the Civil Service Regulation Acts the proper course would be to seek the approval of the Oireachtas for a straightforward measure to enable the benefits of establishment to be conferred upon the forester staff without the formalities of a competition. That objective will be attained by Sections 2, 4 and 5 of this Bill.
The only other provision in the Bill is of a consequential nature. Provided there are sufficient vacancies available, forestry trainees who satisfactorily complete their course of training and show promise of fitness for appointment as foresters enter the forester staff without undergoing acompetition—the course of training itself having been awarded on the results of a competition held by the Civil Service Commissioners. Existing forestry trainees are not, however, eligible under their conditions of service for appointment as forester in an established capacity without competition. Section 3 of the Bill is designed to remove this difficulty.
