I welcome the opportunity to saying a few words on this issue. We have so few opportunities to debate the public service that it is most encouraging to hear people stress the value of public service. I agree with Deputy Finian McGrath's comments. We have lost our appreciation for the valuable work done by civil servants.
I want to say a few words about the background to the appointment of the local appointments commissioners. It is interesting that, before the foundation of this State, George Russell, AE, writing about how local appointments were made at that time in the Galway Express of 7 September 1910, had this to say:
All the local appointments are in their gift, and hence you get drunken doctors, drunken rate collectors, drunken J.P.'s, drunker inspectors, — in fact, round the gombeen system reels the whole drunken congested world, and underneath this revelry and jobbery the unfortunately peasant labours and gets no return for his labour. Another enters and takes his cattle, his eggs, his oats, his potatoes, his pigs, and gives what he will for them, and the peasant toils on from year to year, being doled out Indian meal, flour, tea, and sugar, enough to keep him alive. He is a slave almost as much as if he were an indentured native and had been sold in the slave markets.
The Minister of State is taking notes already, which is good because I will return to this as it is relevant. John Millington Synge writing, I think, in the year 1908 had the following to say:
There are many sides of all that Western eye, the groggy — patriot — publican — general shopman who is married to the priest's half-sister and is second cousin one-removed of the dispensary doctor that are horrible and awful. This is the type that is running the present United Irish League anti-grazier campaign, while they're swindling the people themselves in a dozen ways and then buying out their holdings and packing off whole families to America. The subject is too big to go into here, but at best it's beastly. All that side of the matter of course I left untouched in my stuff. I sometimes wish to God I hadn't a soul and then I could give myself up to putting those lads on the stage. God, wouldn't they hop! In a way it is all heart-rending, in one place the people are starving but wonderfully attractive and charming, and in another place where things are going well, one has a rampant, double-chinned vulgarity I haven't seen the life of. As you know ... [and it goes on].
This raises an interesting question that has often been a matter of debate, including among authors such as Dr. Mary Daly and others who wrote on the background to the Irish Government Departments and what happened when the new State was formed.
Those two quotations are from before the State was founded, 1908 and 1910. That is important because there was a twist in colonial scholarship for a long time. It continued into the 1960s in Africa and elsewhere with suggestions that the natives were not able to run themselves and that, therefore, corrupt practices somehow or another were an aspect of underdevelopment. This assertion was made about Africa, Asia and Ireland. The reality is set out in K. Theodore Hoppen's book about electoral practices in the 19th century in which there are quotations about the amount of whiskey required, the amount of lemons that had to be bought for polling day and so forth in counties like the western counties. Corrupt practices in electoral practices and in appointments were there before the State was founded. They are not essentially nativistic.
After the State was founded, my colleague, Deputy Burton, quoted from the Mulcahy papers about how people were approached for appointments. One of the most dramatic events possibly was the appointment of a town clerk who was illiterate. He told the local barber as he was being shaved what had happened at the meetings and the barber wrote it down for him. This was one of the cases that was quoted in the papers that led to the establishment originally of the Local Appointments Commission. There were several associated with the appointment of dispensary doctors where, depending on the amount of money on offer and the amount of drink consumed, the rumour would come out that one person had it and there would be another rumour that someone else had it and that the first person's position had weakened and so forth. There was a necessity to lift appointments to public office positions into an accountable structure. That was the origin of the Local Appointments Commission.
I want to be clear about what I am saying. What is being suggested is that we should reform that system, as Deputy Burton described it, of legal certainty into something that will be, as described in this legislation, a code of practice. A code of practice is not worth a tráithnín by comparison with legal certainty, but it represents a kind of influence of alleged business efficiency thinking into the public sector for which there is very little evidence. Rather, there is considerable evidence to the contrary in that the intrusion of so-called "commercial ethics", which are harder and harder to discern these days, into the public service has been destructive.
It is astonishing that Secretaries General of Departments, within a year or two of their retirement, can work in the commercial sector competing with other companies for work which is the subject of public decision making and contract. It should be admirable to work in the public service. One should walk off into the sunset, one's work done as a Secretary General of a Department. Why should one want to hang on forever to be on a string of boards or have an insatiable desire to go into the commercial sector because there is money in it? That is not a good example down through a Department.
I was a Minister and was shocked at the army of poorly-paid junior civil servants and the clear divisions between them and the middle and higher ranks. I do not argue against reform — I am in favour of it. In my time, people below the rank of principal officer would refer to the principal officer and anyone above as "Mister". The file would be sent to Mr. so and so. One could not refer to them by their first name — they would have a heart attack if they read it on the file. One does not have to get an MBA from Trinity — either on one's own or in a group, as many did — to know that kind of crazy, archaic practice is daft.
If one wanted public service reform, one could achieve it by abolishing the rigid hierarchies that prevailed. There were numerous blocks to contact with the Minister and there were others in respect of who was entitled to generate a letter. There were people who can copy a letter but not write one and there were people who cannot initiate a proposal. These are flavours we have inherited that are more reminiscent of the Raj in India than of a modern state.
It would be better if people, instead of taking notions of incorporating unaccountable principles from the business sector, had looked at their Departments and decision making and decided to introduce genuine reforms that would allow flexibility and the application of the intelligence that exists at all ranks in the public service. Instead of that, an accountable principle of legitimacy in the Local Appointments Commission is being replaced with an alleged code of practice. In regard to the code of practice, what kind of questions will be asked of a person? I was a sociologist for 25 years and one of the biggest shifts have I noticed has been in language. People are being interviewed in terms of their commitment to individualism — not personal. The word "personal" is no longer used — it is about personal development. Individualism is an appeal to where one sees oneself in so many years and so forth. The idea that one would make a commitment to the public service and be interested in something that is beyond the self has been denigrated. That is an appalling development.
Friedrich von Hayek was the great theoretician whom Margaret Thatcher described coming into her office and saying, "Minister, do not worry — the market will do it for you". How right he was. It was upon this old reactionary's book the whole thing was based — the destruction of the public world. The idea was set aside that it was a wonderful thing to be a dentist who did not discriminate between private and public patients, or be a teacher who found it wonderful to be teaching children and did not have to go into cramming schools. This was a philosophical shift based on individualism and greed.
There is no certainty in this shift. I mention it to summarise where I was in this regard. I have said it is necessary to change the corrupt practices which were part of the detritus of a colonial world. I have also said that the pre-1940 system was associated with an early stage of development of a new state. When they came in, we wanted certainty and openness.
A shabby version in the explanatory memorandum to the Bill which I found states that the new authority will be entitled, when it has set itself up some kind of a licensed recruitment body, to charge fees to applicants. I do not defend the existing practices of the Local Appointments Commission, which I find deficient. For example, it has been writing back to applicants about a year and a half after they have been interviewed, even though it promised to give them the results of their evaluative interviews and so forth. It needs change. The idea that one would charge for an application is disastrous.
I was a Minister with a certain amount of responsibility for the Office of Public Works, which Deputy Parlon now has. It was one of those great gravy trains which are associated with political patronage. I recall the many letters I received from people who wanted to be appointed to summer jobs in museums and other institutions. It was one of the great apple trees of patronage for Fianna Fáil. People were quite shocked that any Minister who would replace another would not be able to do the same thing. That was corruption and it was disgraceful. We need more, not less, certainty, openness and transparency in all of these appointments.
I made comments about Secretaries General of Departments to which I wish to enter a caveat, namely, that there have been admirable and distinguished people, some of whom worked with me. Many took on politically difficult tasks such as the establishment of Teilifís na Gaeilge. My admiration for them is immense but it is wrong to move from the public to the private sector as rapidly as many have. There should be recognition within the service for the very talented people who achieve wonderful results. I remember when a staff of four was establishing the film industry but the promotional opportunities for a very distinguished and fine public servant were blocked because of the way in which the Department was structured.
If one wanted reform — and I can guarantee it will never happen — the one thing that is crying out to be done is the resolution of the unconstitutional nature of the hegemony of the Department of Finance in respect of appointments. There is no constitutional basis for it — it is a practice. If one reads Professor Fanning's book on the history of the Department of Finance or looks at it in comparison to other systems, they got away with it early on, with good lessons from the British Treasury which stayed on for a full decade after independence to ensure we had the same colonial mentality in what they called the Treasury. The Department's veto over appointments has wrecked one good idea after another. I looked at it in some detail at one stage and noted its original opposition to the establishment of the ESB — when it stated that electricity would never catch on — right through to when I dealt with the Department in connection with the establishment of Teilifís na Gaeilge.
I recall when we bought buildings and established Carton House in connection with the museum in Mayo, how the Department refused permission to appoint even the staff at the door to block us from opening. That is the kind of practice that should be reformed. There is nothing in this Bill that will make the Department of Finance go back to the discipline of the Cabinet, the Constitution or this House, nor are there significant proposals for changing the managerial Act which gives county managers extraordinary power. In that context, I was part of teaching courses that lead to the original establishment of the Act on a trial basis in 1940, the Act was revised in 1955 and changed again with the planning Acts of the 1960s.
Those circumstances, which gave such absolute power to managers, no longer exist. We should be taking the functions of local decision making and giving them back to elected and accountable representatives rather than, as we did last November with disastrous consequences, giving further power to county managers in a totally unaccountable way. Thus, in regard to waste management and a range of issues, local representatives can be overruled, the democratic decision need not be observed and the manager can implement a diktat from the Minister. That is what is happening. There will be no reform of finance, internal decision making in Departments or of the City and County Management Acts and no genuine reform of local government.
There seems to be an extraordinary fetish. As a former Minister I find it sad to hear people speak as though magic were being made in the private sector and wishing it could be brought into the public sector to make it more imaginative. In the private sector there are a significant number of individuals who do not reside in this country to avoid paying tax but are able to come back to purchase State assets and make vast speculative fortunes from them. Those people will not have their citizenship challenged in any proposed referendum. They are regarded as useful parasites, which is what they are. People will always justify their existence by saying that if they are spending their money ostentatiously, buying expensive wine for example, they must be paying secondary taxes such as VAT, which will come back to us and are we not lucky to have their likes? The argument that was made about the landlords in the 19th century is now made about this new parasitic landlord class.
Yes, there are good business practices. I was a member of a commerce faculty and I recall discussing management practices 30 years ago. However, this Bill is not about management. It is about setting up little unaccountable structures as an alternative to an existing legally-established, accountable structure.
If this is a genuine republic, which it is not often described as these days, it should be open to any boy or girl to aspire to work in any part of the public service, not to be charged a fee for that and to know he or she will be treated as equal citizens and not have to dance to the whim of an interview body which has, in turn, a licence from another body which is not totally accountable.
Will appointments be made using the standards formerly used by the banks? Banks used to have honourable labour practices. However, bank officials have now been reduced to being yellow-pack workers. Customers are asked to have their dockets filled out before they get to the counter because counter staff are under great pressure. The banks were a disgrace. A candidate for a bank manager's post would be asked if his wife would be available to be treasurer of the tennis club and if he would be available to join the golf club, to infiltrate the local community and to turn up to present jerseys to the most impoverished sections of the parish. Will this kind of stuff be the basis of a public service interview? Will the interview assess a candidate for skills which would be more appropriate to a worker in McDonalds? Who will ask a candidate about his or her commitment to the public?
Before this disease infected our republic there were people working on the railways whose fathers and grandfathers worked there. People who worked on buses were proud of their fathers' and grandfathers' occupations. There were dockers who could remember generations of people who had worked on the docks. Such people talked about the dignity and value of their work. At that time there was respect for the public service. A person who was able to treat everyone equally was ethically a giant. Different people will now be able to set up little cliques to recruit unaccountably.
When the European Union applicant states look to reform their public service they will look to see that a person is not corrupt, is honest and can deal with people on an ethically-fair basis. Is it not interesting to see where corruption has arisen? It has arisen in the most speculative parts of what has been made private. Corruption relating to building land has been found among people who are not really in the building industry but form a land ownership corps within the building industry which has decided to rob young couples of the likelihood of ever owning a house. Corruption has also occurred in some parts of the financial sector. I do not hear people saying we need urgent reform of corporate ethics so that the public can, once again, trust the people who take decisions on their behalf. One may say that is a matter for another day. We are dealing today with the Public Service Management (Recruitment and Appointments) Bill.
There are many things we can do to improve public service management and I have listed just a few. With regard to recruitment and appointments it is important that we build on existing certainties. The Labour Party spokesperson on finance, Deputy Burton, pointed out that much of the legislation relating to accountability and transparency and much of the reform of information, appointments and other areas introduced by the Government of which I was a member, is being rolled back. What has happened? Has there been an ethical revolution in the cumainn of which I did not know? Are they now more pure, pristine and accountable than the structures of the State itself? I like the idea that they are now so pure that a code of ethics rather than legal certainty will be sufficient to protect us from corruption.
I was once a spokesperson on education. I recall the number of letters I received about appointments within the VEC structure, the different and variable outcomes of those processes and the appointments that had little to do with qualification and appropriateness. Can we be guaranteed that the ethos which delivered so many corrupt appointments will not be extended into so many other areas at national, regional or local level?
I urge that we think again about what we are doing to the Local Appointments Commission. We should reform the commission and make it more efficient, flexible and modern institution. However, we must leave it its certainty, accountability and openness. We should then do a root and branch reform of Departments and introduce the necessary procedures. All of this can be done better than this legislation proposes.
In the future, I hope I will be able to say that many of my proposals were embraced and that this debate led to an all-party consensus on the kinds of reforms that are necessary. My party colleagues and I would be willing to commit ourselves to that.
As a trade unionist of 40 years, I am deeply disappointed that this measure appears to have come from a process involving senior trade union participation. However, as Deputy Burton has pointed out, it may well be that the trade unions expressed concerns which were not addressed in the drafting of the legislation.
