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Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 10 Feb 1943

Vol. 27 No. 14

Inquiry into Civil Service—Motion (Resumed).

Debate resumed on the following motion:—
"That the Government be requested to appoint a commission to inquire into and make recommendations as to what steps are desirable to increase the usefulness of the Civil Service to the community as a whole; that, in the opinion of the Seanad, the terms of reference to the commission should include inquiry into the methods of recruitment and promotion in the Civil Service, and the relations of that Service with outside organisations, especially those which deal with production or distribution."—(Senators Douglas and M. Hayes.)

This motion was moved some weeks ago by Senator Douglas and spoken to by the Minister for Finance and, owing to a combination of circumstances, there has been a considerable interval between the opening of the debate and its continuance and, I hope, conclusion, to-night.

I am seconding this motion on its merits and I should like, at the outset, to make it clear that it is in no way intended to be an attack upon civil servants, upon the Civil Service, or upon any particular group of civil servants; nor is it, indeed, in my judgment, referable particularly to this emergency, nor do I intend to discuss the very large question as to whether the Civil Service should not, in fact, be reduced or whether there should not be less interference with, or management of, the lives and the business of citizens. That is too large a topic for this motion. I am simply accepting the position that the Civil Service is a big machine which, in the words of the Minister for Finance, is likely to grow larger and that it ought, therefore, to be investigated periodically with a view to seeing that the very best service is taken from it.

I should be the last person to attack the present Civil Service, because I have had, in more than one capacity, ample experience of the loyalty and industry and devotion to duty of civil servants. I saw, in 1922 and subsequent years, these qualities displayed by them, their anxiety to give of their best, and the very remarkable versatility that a number of civil servants were able to display, turning from old tasks to tasks of an entirely new nature.

The emergency, it appears to me, only quickens a process which has been going on for a considerable number of years, a process by which Parliament and Government interfere—I use the word without attaching to it any particular weight of meaning—more and more with the lives of ordinary citizens. We are aware that the Civil Service from which our Civil Service descends is the British Civil Service; that that Civil Service was developed to deal with a laissez faire organism, to deal with the affairs of a Government and a Parliament whose settled policy was a policy of non-interference with the ordinary lives of the people. It dealt with two or three main subjects. One of these was war, including an army, of course, and the war that it was framed and developed to meet was something quite different from what we are witnessing at the moment, which is called total war. The main subjects were war, courts and foreign affairs. But, within the last 100 years, and more particularly the last 30 years, the functions of Parliament and Government have been steadily widening and, at an accelerated pace, covering a much larger area.

There have been certain adaptations but, if one cares to examine the difference between the tasks that confronted the Civil Service before the Lloyd George Budgets early in this century, from 1909 to 1911, one can easily see that since that time the Unemployment Insurance Act, the National Health Insurance Acts and a great variety of other Acts were passed, and, even in the domain of social services, to take but one comparatively small area out of a vast expanse, the Civil Service has been given a much wider variety of functions. There have been since then some adaptations, but hardly any of principle, and I feel that they are not sufficient to enable the Civil Service to deal with its present task and with the tasks with which, there is practical unanimity, it will be faced in the future. The only really important change that has been brought in is the principle of competitive examination, the principle of competition for posts. That is the major change.

Now, the State provides capital money or annual grants for a great many purposes, which would have shocked statesmen or parliamentarians a generation or two ago. Here, for example, we have grants for capital money provided for such things as the Electricity Supply Board, the Agricultural Credit Corporation, the Industrial Credit Corporation, the sugar beet industry, insurance and so on, and we have also recently formed a shipping company and a Central Bank. Whether we like it or not, these are activities of Government, and seeing that Government money, voted by Parliament, goes into these activities, it is necessary for the State to keep some touch with them and some form of control. It is because of that, that you have new and varied functions for the Civil Service, and what we ought to consider is whether persons, recruited under the old system, can possibly carry out different functions, which would have been unthinkable some years ago. The Department of Supplies, for instance, has been cited as an example, and it is likely that, after this war, the Department of Supplies will survive in some form or another, but I should like to take another example, which is more familiar to me but which is hardly ever mentioned.

I should like Senators to consider the great variety of matters which now come within the purview of the Department of Education. That Department deals with primary and secondary education, as well as technical education. It deals now with a much bigger field than it ever dealt with before. It deals, as I have said, with technical education, and also with such matters as domestic economy. The National Gallery, the School of Art, the National Library, and the Museum all come under its control, and it also deals with industrial schools. Now, in connection with all these matters, there is what is called in the Civil Service a file, which eventually reaches the head of the Department of Education, and he has to give an opinion on all these extraordinarily different things. I knew for a long time that that was the position, but I did not realise it fully until I, myself, was a Minister for Education. Take the Museum alone as an example, and consider the extraordinary variety of knowledge that is required there. One has to have knowledge of archæology, of old glass, of old lace—of 101 things which one does not usually associate at all with education. When you come to consider that, you really wonder at the small number of highly-paid people that there are in the Department of Education at all. For example, we spend nearly £4,000,000 — £3,800,000 — on primary education. Now, I want to dissociate myself completely from the kind of propaganda, which was common at one time, about the highly-paid civil servants. As far as I know, there is only one highly-paid civil servant, on the £1,000 a year scale in the office, dealing with that £4,000,000 a year expenditure, and I should say that in that case, instead of its being a matter of over-staffing, it seems to be a matter of under-staffing.

One could give the very same example from other Departments. Long ago, in the days of Sinn Féin and, indeed, in the days when Fianna Fáil was getting into office, there used to be denunciation of boards and bureaucrats but, unfortunately, we have more and more boards and more and more bureaucrats, using that word in an inoffensive manner to indicate civil servants, and we are moving into a stage when we are likely to have government by experts. I am sufficiently old-fashioned to be lacking in enthusiasm for that. I have known quite a number of experts, and I know they can be charming people, but I would rather not be governed by them, if I could avoid it. We have county and city managers and more and more civil servants. We are, in fact, creating—and we are not alone, because almost every country is creating it in one way or another—a new ascendancy. We used to fulminate in former times against the old ascendancy, and I have learned that along with having demerits they had certain merits, but we ought at least to take steps to train and pick with great care the new ascendancy we are creating ourselves and to refresh them for the performance of their duties by releasing them from time to time.

On that question of experts, one of the difficulties in the Civil Service has always been, and is yet, that no satisfactory solution has been found for the relations between the experts and the administrators. The Civil Service is ruled by clerks—again, I use the word simply to mean "administrator"— and, taking education again as an example, a man might be an admirable head of a Department to guide education itself—the inspectors, the programmes in the schools—but put him down at a desk, smother him in files and he becomes, perhaps, not at all so competent a person. In fact, you smother the real qualities the man has, but the Civil Service is so geared up that the head of every Department must be the accounting officer; he must be, in other words, a clerk and not an expert, and he must be a clerk who has to deal with all kinds of things. He constitutes a bottle-neck and he has time for no thinking at all. He is smothered in work, smothered in day-to-day things, smothered in files, and has no opportunity of standing and looking at the work of his Department.

There is another point which might be considered. The Civil Service in the old days was a very small body, controlled entirely by the Treasury, now the Department of Finance. I do not know whether Senators who have not had any administrative experience realise how far that particular control goes. It is not only control of the amount of money that may be spent on a big thing, but it goes down to the smallest details of staff and the smallest figures of expenditure. It worked very well, perhaps, in a small machine, but it is now, I think, quite ineffective in a machine which has grown out of all proportion and has become completely unwieldy. The Minister for Finance, who can be very pleasant when he likes—and I am not sure that he was not humbugging when he said this—said in the course of his reply that the Civil Service was slow, but that the Ministry of Finance was there to hasten things. I took occasion to say to him that I thought the Ministry of Finance was a brake rather than an accelerator and anybody with the slightest experience of it knows that that is so. In the nature of things, the Ministry of Finance is a bottle-neck and it is beyond human capacity and beyond human knowledge that there should be a chief establishment officer in the Department of Finance who understands all the Departments. It simply could not be.

Again I could give simple examples without going into the affairs of the Department of Supplies or the Department of Industry and Commerce. The Department of Education decides, for its own purpose, that examinations will be conducted by certain types of persons. Having done that, the Department of Finance fixes all the points about remuneration. They fix this kind of thing—it does not affect me, I hasten to add—that a university examiner will get £5 for setting the first paper, less for setting the second paper, and, if he is to set four papers, he will get £10. That is to say that somebody in the Department regards the setting of examination papers as being the same as punching eyelet holes and that the fourth is easier to punch than the first. It may, in fact, be much harder, but that is one simple example.

In other words, when policy has been decided on by one Department, the Department of Finance steps in to arrange all the details, so that the results will, possibly, be quite different from those contemplated by that Department.

Anybody who was ever in the office of an establishment officer in the Department of Finance, and looked at all the files surrounding the unfortunate individual, will realise that he could not, possibly, get all the work done. How is it done? It is done in the old, traditional way. Traditions have a habit of not being evaded. When a Department wants six clerical officers, it asks for 12 and is offered three. That is the first reaction. I want to assure the House that the Civil Service is staffed exactly on the same principles as those on which a farmer sells his cow at a fair.

A sound theory.

It is, at any rate, native and traditional, but it is much more cumbersome and causes much greater delay than is the case when a man sells his cow at a fair. The man brings his cow into the fair to-day; he sells it to-day; he gets his money to-day and he goes home; but the head of a Department writes on 1st January that he wants 12 clerical officers, knowing that he has no chance in the world of getting them. He is first told that he does not want any and, then, after some argument, he is told he can have three. After further delay, he gets four, and, if he is resolute, he gets six. I should like to put it to the House that I do not believe that anybody knows exactly how many clerical officers he ought to get, although the Minister said there was a perfect scheme for doing that. I should like to differ from the Minister—I do not think there is any scheme for doing it.

Exactly the same thing occurs sometimes on questions of promotion and increases of pay. A sum of £100 is asked for in respect of a particular officer. The Department of Finance says that the man should not get anything and they yield by saying that he can get £25. Eventually, he gets £50, not because he deserved £50—he may not deserve anything, in fact—but because the head of his Department was strong enough in this titanic struggle with the Department of Finance to get £50 out of them. There is no rational method that I ever encountered in my experience of discovering what a particular individual ought to get. It is done on a process of bargaining.

I do not want to be understood as decrying what the Department of Finance do. They have a very difficult job and they have this answer to what I am saying—and it is a good answer so far as it goes—that every Department's goose is a swan. Anyone who wants promotion for a man in his Department describes him as marvellous. The Department of Finance takes the reverse view and regards all the swans as geese. Neither view is correct.

It is not possible for the Department of Finance to be all-knowing and all-pervading. They could not possibly be. They could not possibly be experts on what is going to happen in the Museum, or on whether a book for the Parliamentary Library is or is not a suitable book for a Parliamentary Library. I have seen that discussed at some length with the Department of Finance. They cannot be experts on everything and the present system makes every single thing flow into the Department of Finance and come out of it extremely slowly, with very bad results. It is not possible to maintain exactly that kind of control over an ever-growing Civil Service—a Civil Service which is growing not only in numbers, but in functions—and they cannot possibly work satisfactorily. They accomplish a great many small economies. I was told recently that if you agree to do a broadcast for twenty minutes for a certain figure and if, in fact, you stop after eighteen minutes, the two minutes will be taken off your fee and one-tenth of it deducted, and that that happened in the case of people playing a concerto which was to last for thirty minutes and which lasted only twenty-seven minutes. One-tenth of the fee was promptly docked.

If it had gone on for thirty-one minutes, would they have got an extra amount?

They would have been reproved for occupying the time of the station.

That kind of thing is done constantly. Talking of pre-war conditions, if an Army officer wanted to get an allowance for a private car, he made application to his own branch, then to the Quarter Master General, then to the Chief of Staff, then to the Minister, and next to the finance section of the Department of Defence, after which the Department of Finance had to "O.K." all, and through all these channels there filtered back to the individual making the application, a query devised by a young man in the Department of Finance who deals with that kind of thing. If he does not find a precedent, then he has to know all about it. That was all very fine in a particular scheme of organisation but I suggest that it is not working satisfactorily now. Anything that was never done before is outside their scope.

As to recruitment to the Civil Service, it was a marvellous business for us in this country when the British proceeded to have open competitive examinations for a considerable number of their civil servants. In this country, at the present time, the Civil Service is able to get the very best products of our secondary schools. It is very remarkable that, in the British days, it was possible to get into the Civil Service from the primary schools. That is no longer possible. I am not speaking now with regard to particular Governments. That has not been possible for many a long year. I tried to arrange for it and I was a complete failure. I could not do it.

We get in excellent material from secondary schools at examinations for clerical officers and junior executive officers. It is an open question, and worthy of consideration, whether a merely written examination, producing a particular result with people numbered 1, 2 and 3, is the very best way of getting the best candidates. It is still more open to question whether, when they get in, the best possible use is made of them.

I have met in the first year at the University students, boys or girls who did extremely well in the Leaving Certificate, went for the Junior Executive and got a high place. Such a person leaves the University some time about Easter and goes into the Civil Service. According to the Civil Service regulations, nobody can attend University lectures in the morning. That regulation was made when I was Ceann Comhairle of the Dáil and I pride myself that it was evaded in the case of members of the staff here with satisfactory results for the State and even for the Department of Finance. It often struck me in such cases that it would be better to give these people a place in the Civil Service, to let them go on and finish their University course, and then either go into the Civil Service as executive officers with University degrees or compete for the administrative class, which is equal to the First Division.

Another thing that one feels is that the Civil Service, particularly since the scope was narrowed in this country, should give the same opportunities as are given in other countries for refresher courses, and for training outside the State. That has been resorted to in the case of certain specialised posts, such as posts in the Museum. It seems to me that, in a small country like this, it is open to argument and inquiry whether it would not be better to appoint certain people after the age of 21 or 22 years. I remember that, in 1922, a difficulty was experienced in getting into the Civil Service satisfactory private secretaries, and the President of University College, Dublin, was asked to nominate three people of good academic standing, the kind of person who would go into the British First Division. The three people nominated were engaged in particular professions, one being a barrister and another an assistant in Classics in University College. They were taken in and have been highly successful.

One is now our Consul-General in New York; one is in a very high place in the Department of Finance, the other is in a high position in the Department of Justice and is now the Civil Service officer in charge of censorship. I hope that will not be held against him. Some scheme might be devised, more difficult and more complicated to work perhaps, but which would give better results than merely having competition, getting the result, and putting these persons into the Civil Service where, with few outside contacts, they spend the remainder of their lives.

The Civil Service used to be a very leisurely institution. It is by no means that since 1922. I remember as a student meeting people who had the advantage of being clerks in the Courts of Justice. I met one person at 2 o'clock one day and he said he was terribly busy and did not get off until 1.30, because two of the men in the office were ill. He did three men's work, apparently, before 1.30. There are no such men in the service now, and the stories that go about of men having high pay in such positions are in almost every instance false. It seems to me that the difficulty in the Civil Service now is the reverse. There is in the Civil Service quite a number of bottle-necks, but the higher official is overworked. He has to sit at a desk surrounded by files, he has to deal with telephones, with interviews, with a superior or a Minister, and can enjoy no leisure. Above all, he has no opportunity of doing any thinking about his job. That is a matter of experience. I feel that—it may not be a popular thing to suggest—the question might be investigated as to whether it would be possible to have some people at the top of the Civil Service who would be well paid and who would not be smothered by day-to-day work. In the Department of Education, I am certain there is not a single individual who can go in and sit down at an empty desk and think of anything at all about the educational system. Everybody is immersed in an immediate job and that immediate job takes up all his time. Some such people, for example, might devise a scheme whereby, in the case of industry and agriculture, production and distribution, that are mentioned here, instead of control by the Civil Service there might be more cooperation.

With regard to Civil Service methods, I am, of course, well aware, as the Minister for Finance said, that the Civil Service is not a business, and the notion that if business men got control of the Civil Service they would make it hum and change it, is undoubtedly erroneous. They would not do any such thing. I understand that the British experience in the last war was that the business men who were brought in to run the Civil Service ran it at enormous expense. The Civil Service is not a business. As the Minister for Finance very properly indicated, the fact that the Civil Service has to work for a Minister who is responsible to Parliament and who can be asked questions or challenged makes things slow and cautious. But I am not so sure that one thing that slows up everything, namely, Parliamentary Questions in the Dáil, might not be very much altered. There is a certain type of Parliamentary Question that might easily be relegated to a committee or might be dealt with in quite a different way from the present public method.

There is no doubt that every human being enjoys power; that the Civil Service has great power, and that the possession of power creates a desire for more power. There is an attitude all over the world amongst civil servants, and I suppose here as well, that there is hardly any job they could not do better than the people who are doing it. That is an illusion, of course. The Minister's line in his speech was that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. He took the line that the Civil Service is slow, that it is bound to be slow.

And sure.

I wish it were sure; I am not so sure that it is. For example, a friend of mine once told me that he was applying to hire a garage that the Board of Works had to let. I met him shortly afterwards and he said to me: "Those fellows in the Board of Works think they are letting Saorstát Eireann whole and entire to me instead of an ordinary common or garden garage." The way in which the Board of Works wanted to let him the garage, the number of forms to be filled, and the number of guarantees that a well-known Dublin business man was to give for a 20/- per week garage annoyed him so much that he said they could keep their garage and, in three months afterwards, he got it for 5/- per week less and gave no guarantees at all. That is the kind of thing that is happening every day in connection with supplies and matters of that kind that I do not want to go into. The Minister's line was that the Civil Service was slow, that it was increasing in numbers, increasing in cost, increasing in functions, and that that process was bound to go on, and the Minister felt that there could be no remedy for that as long as Parliament lasts.

If our system cannot adapt itself to changing conditions, this Parliamentary system is bound to go. One of the reasons that it has gone, or is going, in certain places, is that it failed to adapt itself to changing conditions. The Minister is against an inquiry at present. Surely the present, when people's minds are open to all kinds of change, when we have a kind of melting period, would be the best time to have this kind of inquiry. For these reasons I suggest that an inquiry should be held, that it should be held now before the war ends, that it should be held by people who have experience of this Civil Service and of another Civil Service, and, if possible, by business men who have been in contact with public life—not by business men who have been in contact with the Civil Service—and who, as business men, are capable of contrasting methods. I am tempted to add, although it is not in the motion, that another great bottle-neck, the Department of Local Government, might also be investigated. I do not know whether it is realised that we have created county managers and city managers; that they are now in the position, practically speaking, of being civil servants, and that every single thing they do, such as the appointment of a temporary nurse or the appointment of a temporary draftsman, has to go to the Department of Local Government for sanction. The Department of Local Government stands to the local bodies exactly as the Department of Finance to the other Departments of the State, with, of course, the exception and the difference that the local bodies have not got the same access to the Department of Local Government as the ordinary civil servant has to the Department of Finance. But these two bottle-necks are immense clogs upon any kind of progress. A certain amount of economy may be effected by them, but it is doubtful whether you would not get more economy by getting a better machine and throwing more responsibility upon the people below. For these reasons I support the motion and I think, in spite of the difficulties of the present situation, that it is when people's minds are open to change that an inquiry ought to take place.

The Civil Service, undoubtedly, is the victim of a lot of inaccurate and unfair criticism. There may be some ground for some of the charges brought against it, but, on the whole, I think it gives good service. This country did not invent red tape. It was invented in another country and the delays and the annoying methods of the Civil Service in holding up business are just as common across the Channel as here. There has been a little book published under the title, "Passed to you, please," which, I believe, is a skit on the English Civil Service.

It is not a skit; it is deadly serious.

I believe it describes the annoying delays in English administration for which civil servants are responsible. There is another charge brought against the Civil Service in this country and I believe the English Civil Service, that it has undue power and that Ministers are practically pawns in the hands of the higher officials in the service. There is an anecdote told in connection with the English Civil Service when a change of Government was pending some years ago. Somebody said to one of the high Treasury officials: "You fellows had better look out. There is a certain Government coming into power and you will have to mind your P's and Q's." The official replied: "It does not matter what Government gets in, whether Conservative, Liberal or Labour, we are the Government." That mentality is also said to actuate the Civil Service here. Personally I do not believe it does. But when a man wants anything done by any Government Department and there is any undue delay about it, it is always said: "These Civil Service fellows are holding it up and will not allow it to be done."

There may be a case for a general overhaul, but somehow these commissions of inquiry do not appear to get anywhere. You appoint commissions of inquiry to go into all sorts of matters, but somehow the result does not lead to anything. There should be some other method of discovering a means of rectifying these matters rather than a commission of inquiry, which may take months and months to go into a matter, amass a pile of evidence, and then the thing is set aside and left there.

Although I have often criticised them, I believe the higher officials of the Civil Service are overworked. Many of them have told me that they have often to bring work home with them from the office and often work until midnight in order to complete work they have on hands, that their working day does not end at 5 o'clock in the evening but very often only begins then. The heads of Departments have to be experts. They have to know more about government than a Minister knows. They have to know all the details of government and have to be thoroughly conversant with everything connected with their Departments. Very often, a Minister coming into power has to learn from them. It is not to be expected that a Minister of any Government on taking charge of a Department could be as conversant with the work of that Department as men who have been working in it for years. That does not happen in any country. You may get an extraordinary expert on finance, like Sir Josiah Stamp, in England, or men of that type. If they were put in charge of finance, they might make a terrible mess of it. They might be first-class men in the outside world but, when it came to dealing with the work of a Government Department, they might be completely at sea. There was an agitation in England a few years ago for a businessmen's Government. The people who fostered it claimed that no man should run the Department of Justice but a lawyer, that no man should be First Lord of the Admiralty but a sailor, and so on. Very often, the sailor and the lawyer might not be competent to run these particular Departments. It requires a certain type of mind, certain mental alertness, to be able to manage such Departments and very often men in these professions would not be proper men for the job. On the question as to whether or not the problem could be solved by establishing a commission, somehow I have no faith at all in commissions. We have had so many commissions to inquire into all sorts of subjects whose findings are gathering dust in Government offices that I am afraid a commission is not the best way to solve the difficulty.

This is a very difficult as well as a very important problem. I was glad to see the line that Senator Goulding took on it and to know from the tone of his speech that it is possible to have it debated in a reasonable way. As a member of one commission which is at present sitting and whose findings are likely to have a rather important bearing on this whole question, I do not know that I am prepared to agree with what he says as to the uselessness of commissions. The usefulness, or otherwise, of commissions depends entirely on the quality of the work they do and the reports they prepare. It is rather sweeping to condemn all commissions out of hand and to say that the method of considering such a subject as this through a commission is a hopeless method. The question is: what is a good method of considering it? What is the alternative to setting up some sort of commission of inquiry through which the whole matter can be gone into thoroughly?

There is no doubt at all that, both inside and outside the Oireachtas, there is a very considerable amount of uneasiness about the growth and methods of the Civil Service. I entirely agree with Senator Hayes that it would be altogether wrong to condemn the Civil Service as we have it or its members. It is not their fault that the system is what it is. It was not made by them and they are only operating what has been handed down to them. If we have defects in our Civil Service system, if there are bottle-necks of the type to which Senator Hayes referred and if the public at large is uneasy about, for instance, the growth of the Civil Service, the real fault lies, not with the Civil Service at all but with Parliament and with the Government. It is the job of Parliament to watch over these things, to frame some line of action with regard to them and to take care that no part of its executive machinery gets out of gear, or, if it does get out of gear, remains out of gear for an appreciable period.

There can be no more important work for Parliament to do, it seems to me, than that, and one way of dealing with this question would be to appoint a Parliamentary committee, a committee of experienced Members of Parliament, drawn from all Parties and including among them, not merely people who had experience of government, but people who had experience of business and various aspects of public life. That is one way in which the matter could be discussed and dealt with and I would be fairly confident that, if we had a good Parliamentary committee like that, we would be likely to get good results from it.

As a matter of fact, there has been a good deal of comment and discussion in England lately on this subject. We have all seen in the Press recently that a complete overhaul of the English Foreign Office is contemplated. The work which has led to that suggestion for overhaul has been done in the middle of the most terrible war in which England has ever been engaged. If it is possible for the British, with the responsibilities and the difficulties they have on their shoulders at the present moment, to consider questions like that, why should it be beyond our capacity to do the same thing? It is not only the Foreign Office that has been examined and in whose working improvements have been suggested; some time during the past year, a Committee of the House of Commons—I think it was—made very important suggestions with regard to the Civil Service as a whole. One suggestion, for instance, is that there should be a staff college established for the better training of actual, serving members of the Civil Service and another suggestion is that the titular permanent head of the Civil Service should not be an official of the Treasury. These were, of course, simply suggestions but, within the last week, I think, the First Lord of the Treasury has promised to set up a committee to investigate the recruitment, organisation and conditions of work in the Civil Service in England.

If England can do a thing like that, especially in present circumstances, why should not we be able to do it? There are several reasons why we should always be carrying out some inquiry of this kind, why we should always have this subject uppermost in our minds as members of the Legislature. One is, as Senator Hayes pointed out, that the system which we have inherited is a foreign system. It was originally created in this country by a foreign Power. We took it over and kept it on as a going concern and, ever since we took it over, we have been more or less—if the word is not offensive—tinkering with it. We have been making small changes here and there, adding bits and taking away bits, altering a certain number of trifles, but we have not made any fundamental change in the whole structure of the Civil Service. It is highly questionable whether a country like ours, a small, comparatively poor country, can either afford to have a Civil Service of that kind at all, from the financial point of view, or can indefinitely continue with a political system which produces that kind of Civil Service.

That leads me to another aspect of the matter which, to me—perhaps I am over-imaginative — is extremely serious; that is, the indefinite growth in the numbers of the Civil Service. It seems to be accepted as a sort of inevitable thing that the Civil Service shall go on increasing steadily from year to year, and that no such thing can be contemplated as a time or a means by which a stop can be put to the growth of it. It is a simple enough calculation that if that process goes on inevitably for a certain number of years more, the majority of the people of Ireland will be members of the Civil Service. It could happen in a not very long time, with the enormous increase in the rate of growth that has taken place lately. Sooner or later, if the whole thing is not to become entirely top heavy, it will produce some kind of revolution as a means of getting rid of it. We will have to devise a scheme by which the system can be overhauled, especially if the tendency to perpetual growth is to be checked.

One of the reasons, of course, for the growth of the Civil Service has been the emergency, but there is a much more fundamental reason than that. It is, as Senator Hayes has pointed out, the continual development of State activity in all possible directions. There is hardly a week that we have not, in the Seanad, some fresh example of a sphere of activity into which the State, for one reason or another, very often for quite plausible and temporarily good reasons, sees fit to intrude. Everywhere the State goes, the Civil Service has to go. There have to be increases in the Civil Service to meet this and that new problem, and all the time, as has been very forcibly pointed out, it is highly questionable whether, at the very centre of the whole thing, the machinery is adequate or is capable of functioning properly as it stands.

One of the principal defects, to my mind—I have often said this before— in the whole system is the way in which the working of the Civil Service, as a whole, is dominated by the Department of Finance or, if you like, by the twin Departments—Finance and Local Government. It is quite true, as Senator Hayes has said, that the Department of Local Government exercises the same functions in its sphere that the Department of Finance does in a whole host of other spheres. The assumption that underlies the whole system is that the Department of Finance, for some reason, is gifted with an amount of insight and knowledge into all kinds of administrative problems that is not possessed by the people who are actually closely concerned with those problems: that, for instance, the Department of Finance possesses officials who know more about the details of education than, say, the officers of the Department of Education. When I speak about education in that respect, I know what I am talking about, because I have often discussed this question of the work of the Department of Education with officials of the Department of Finance. I have found that they consider that they have greater authority, in many ways, on subjects related to the work of education than the officials who are in the Department of Education have. The result of that idea is that everything the Department of Education tries to do is held up. As a further result of that, it seems to me—I think it is thoroughly true of the Department of Education —that you have a kind of atrophy developing in these other Departments.

After a long experience, when a very able and highly placed official finds that his real function in the scheme is to be a cog in the wheel of the Department of Finance, he loses interest in his own work, and gradually gets assimilated into the finance machine. He ceases to be as productive on his own subject as he ought to be, and originally was. It is true to say that, at the present time, the Civil Service is gathering up into itself the best brains in Ireland. There is no doubt that the very best young men and women we have are getting into the Civil Service year after year. They are being taken in and treated almost as biological specimens. They are being sterilised, and the life is being knocked out of them. They are being rendered incapable of producing any good work on their own responsibility. I know some young civil servants who feel the effect of that atrophy and sterilisation in their work. Very often they are put on work for which they have no taste. They are not allowed, so far as it can possibly be prevented, to have any outside interests whatever—very few, in any case. The very idea that they might continue the education in which they made such progress is entirely frowned upon. They are regarded as cogs in the machine once they get in and the life is gradually squeezed out of them. There is no denying that, as the system stands, it may be very difficult to deal with it or find a remedy for it, but some remedy will have to be found before the whole thing breaks down.

Senator Hayes deprecated going into fundamental questions like the question of the relation between the Civil Service and Parliament, or the tendency that exists at present for the State to spread into more and more activities. I think that, when this thing is inquired into, if it is inquired into, fundamentally, these wider questions will have to be taken account of. I think the reason for all this development is that the State is usurping, more and more, functions that ought to be performed by other organs in society. As we are at present, we practically have the State—this is not confined to us; it is the universal experience—on the one hand and the individual on the other. Society, as such, has very few organs that can stand up against the State, or that can exercise any real effect on the State. You have the individual, as a citizen, with his vote, and you have the State. There is very little in the way of an intermediary. The individual citizen, once he has fulfilled his function of voting and electing a Parliament, has very little say in what concerns, in the most intimate way, his own life. I am thinking, in particular, of a Department like the Department of Education. I suggested here long ago that an advisory Council of Education would be of the greatest possible assistance and value. As things stand, the Department of Education is so overgrown and has so very scattered and disparate functions that it is quite impossible for one individual to oversee them all and be an expert on them all. Unless some body is set up which can represent the needs and desires of the public to the Department, things will go from bad to worse, the Department will become less and less representative of what the country wants and feels and, ultimately, if that state of affairs spreads to other Departments, the whole machine will break down altogether.

Senator Hayes said a good deal about education and it is not necessary for me to go into detail about it, but there are many aspects of education with which I happen to be fairly familiar and which will illustrate what I am saying. The Senator spoke about the Museum. Anyone who knows anything about the National Museum is aware that, in many ways, it is worse off than it was when the British were here. There has been a certain amount of progress, it is true, but there has also been a great deal of retrogression. In many ways, especially as regards its organisation and capacity to do valuable work for the community, the National Museum is hardly as good now as it was 25 or 30 years ago. That is by no means the fault of the men who are closely associated with the work of the Museum. They have very high attainments and ability, but their capacity for doing good work is entirely frustrated and made entirely useless to the country by the system that exists, and particularly by the fact that such capacity is choked through the operations of the Department of Finance. I am not pleading for a policy of extravagance in regard to institutions like the Museum. There is no need of extravagance, but there is need to see, when money is being spent, that the people who will have the say in spending it know something about what it is being spent on.

A great defect in the whole Civil Service system at the moment is that the final say does not lie with the experts. Although there are plenty of experts in various branches of the Civil Service, their work is frustrated in all sorts of ways, and one can see that most easily in an institution like the Museum. The same thing applies, to a certain extent, to a new body like the Institute of Advanced Studies. I doubt whether that Institute can give the value it might have given to the country, for the very reason that its working is too much subject to the control of the Minister for Finance. An illustration of how it works came to light only a few weeks ago. The professors in the Institute of Advanced Studies are men of great capacity and high standing, but it has been ordained in recent weeks that they are not to be allowed to act as extern examiners to the National University or to have any contact at all with it.

The work of an extern examiner is very light, it would not take up any of their official time and it would be of considerable benefit, both to the men themselves and to the university, but, because of the pedantic character of the machinery in which they are caught up, they are not allowed to do any of that work—they are forbidden completely, are cut off and sealed up in a glass case.

You will find that sort of thing all through the Department of Education and the Civil Service generally. That is regrettable, especially when it has to do with the cultural aspect of life in this country, questions like the cinema, the administration and control of the broadcasting service, and the whole attitude of the State towards the Fine Arts in general. It is true— and no one can deny it—that we are very far behind the standard that has been reached in other countries, where they have a more efficient organisation to deal with these things. No one will say it is in any way unfair to criticise our broadcasting system or the whole situation with regard to the cinema, because we are so badly equipped with the instruments for dealing with these questions. The plea of economy is sometimes used to justify our position with regard to these things. It is a great misfortune, after all the high hopes we had 25 or 30 years ago, about the way we would be able to do great things and get a great place for ourselves in the civilised world, once we had control of our own affairs, to find that, when we have control, we are reduced to a very low position, even amongst the smaller and poorer countries, and that our productions are of such a shoddy character. The cause of all this is the organisation of the Civil Service, the way in which the Department of Finance has choked and checked every attempt to make progress in these respects. To hope that you can do any good by private enterprise in these things is an entire chimera. There is no use in thinking it can be done. The State, or some organ of society given a status and power for the purpose, must deal with these things, as they certainly will not be dealt with and advanced by private individuals.

Once the report of the Vocational Organisation Commission comes out, we shall be in possession of a survey of this whole question, which will throw a good deal of light on what we ought to do with regard to the organisation of the Department of Finance and especially on how we can equip ourselves with new organisations and new machinery, by which society itself, in various aspects of its activity, can do work that the State is either totally incapable of doing or is prevented from doing at the moment by the system of organisation with which it is endowed in the Civil Service.

The object of this motion, which ultimately is to discover what steps would be desirable to increase the usefulness of the Civil Service, is one with which we must all have sympathy, but, in my opinion, to ask for a commission of this kind would be singularly inopportune when the world as we know it is—in the expression in the old Irish Annals—"a quaking sod under our feet". We cannot avoid the tremors, and we do not know what kind of land we will stand on when it is all over. In spite of the argument made by Senator Hayes, that this is a good time to take the steps suggested in the motion, I think it is very inopportune. Senator Tierney spoke of the changes and new points of view that will be brought out in the report of the Vocational Organisation Commission. We all expect that it will be very enlightening and that it will have a great influence on the structure of society. Therefore, a commission that would sit, with the world as it is at present, with our country facing an emergency and with the imminence of the publication of that report, to set up a plan for a Civil Service that could work in a different kind of ordered society than we have at present, would be just a waste of time and labour.

At the same time, I believe it is a good thing that a discussion like this should take place occasionally. Every machine needs overhauling, and it is quite probable that the Civil Service is one of those machines which need adjustment, but we ought to remember that there are other ways than commissions—which are a very cumbersome method—to make those adjustments. The Seanad itself, perhaps, would have as much knowledge as the people who would be likely to be on the commission. As Senator Tierney suggested, we could have a Parliamentary Committee to go into the question. If the commission suggested in the motion were set up, its members would be very largely drawn from the Seanad and the Dáil. Senator Tierney made the point that England, which is a country engaged in the war, finds an opportunity to go into this question at the present time, but I would remind the Senator that England is a big country with 40,000,000 inhabitants. A great many people in this country who would be valuable for such a commission, and who alone would have the experience and ability which would make the work of the commission worth while, are engaged in all kinds of very urgent work at the present moment. Therefore, our case is not on a parallel with England at all. I believe that the motion is inopportune, and for that reason if it is put to a vote I will vote against it.

I feel that the Senator who put down this motion has done a good service in ventilating this question, but it is so immense that I do not see how any debate here can adequately cover the subject. I feel that there has been considerable confusion of thought amongst some of the speakers as to what we are really aiming at. From the speech of Senator Tierney, it appeared as if he wished this inquiry to range over the whole field of the machinery of government. That is rather an alarming prospect.

Undoubtedly, governments have got more complicated as they laid their hands on more activities which were previously done by private enterprise, and I do feel that, accordingly, you want a rather different mentality or outlook in higher civil servants. With regard to the lower grades, I do not think that things need to be changed very much, but I do feel that, in the administrators, you want to get rather a different outlook. How are you going to do that? First of all, I feel it is essential that the men who have to handle the higher side of government should have a university education. I do not know the divisions in this country, but I know the Oxford divisions. A man who took, say, a degree in what they call the modern greats or in economics or in history will not necessarily be a better civil servant than the man who took a degree in the classics. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that, in handling the affairs of life, the man who has had a good, sound education in what they call in Oxford the modern greats has very many advantages. I am anxious to see the higher civil servant a man of balance and judgment, a man of broad outlook, a man who has a general knowledge of the world and of the problems with which he is dealing. The difficulty will be to try to harmonise and blend the academic, scholastic and graduate knowledge that he acquires at the university with the practical problems with which he has to deal. I feel that, after he has been in the Civil Service some time, he should have an opportunity of getting into contact with business affairs. There is a body called the Institute of Business Management. I do think that a civil servant would benefit very much by taking a course or having an insight into the problems with which a body like the Institute of Business Management has to deal. It is now being recognised that, although managers are to a large extent gifted, there are certain rules and principles of management and organisation, and if they are violated—I hope on another occasion to show how certain essential principles are being grossly violated in this country—you never can get efficiency.

I feel, therefore, that, over and above a trained mind, an honours university degree, the civil servant should have a practical knowledge of business management on the one hand; then I feel that he should have knowledge of the world. I feel that civil servants live a life too far apart from the ordinary people. They get into an office, with files, and do not know how the ordinary people respond to what they are doing. For that reason I should like to give the civil servant a sabbatical year, to get him right out of the Civil Service and let him travel. Let him choose what he is going to study in his sabbatical year, and get him right away from the files and the narrow office routine. That, I feel, is a positive approach to a very big problem, because I do not feel that a lot of those problems that are covered by the machinery of government are so much the problems of the civil servant as the problems of the Minister and the people. The people have asked for all these things to be done, and the civil servant is only putting into operation, making practical what the people, through their Ministers, through the democratic machine, have asked for. I think the civil servant has to be an especially well trained, educated and wise person, because he has the most difficult job of all; he has to educate his Minister. Nobody will deny that persons find their way into politics with very little knowledge of business, very little training. They have been able to persuade the people that they will give them salvation and deliverance, and when they come into office with those ideas they find that there are numbers of practical difficulties in carrying their wishes into effect. The civil servant has to do his best to operate those theories. He has to be a man of tact. Naturally, he has to show his Minister that a lot of what he fondly hoped when he was on the hustings making an appeal to the people, cannot be done in practice without complete chaos and dislocation. I want to emphasise that we should try to improve the training, education and outlook of the higher civil servants. We should have men of broad outlook, who are able to co-ordinate technicians, and take the long view of every problem If we could do that, we would be taking a great step forward.

I cannot say that I like this motion. Take this word "usefulness" in the motion. How does one judge whether a thing is useful or not? If you get a pencil sharpener and try to sweep the carpet with it, it is completely useless. Before you can say whether or not a thing is useful, you want to know what it is you require to do. The motion asks that the Government be requested to appoint a commission to inquire into and make recommendations as to what steps are desirable to increase the usefulness of the Civil Service to the community as a whole. There have been complaints about the growth of the Civil Service. Do we want it bigger or what do we want it to do? What I object to is that the Government is doing far too much. First of all, take what you think will be useful and then you have got to think what you want the Civil Service to do. The discussion here this evening has completely, or very largely, overlooked the fact that there is a Government and that there is a Parliament. Senator Tierney spoke about the National Museum and he said that it was rather starved financially. I should like to point out that the Minister decides to put forward a certain estimate of cost for each service and the Dáil decides whether or not it will vote it. There is no need to bother about the Civil Service in that connection. If the weakness of the National Museum is due to lack of funds then it is a matter for Government and for Parliament and not for the Civil Service. If Parliament votes a certain amount for a given Department or for a given subhead under a Department Vote, strictly speaking, legally no more than that may be spent. The Civil Service is acting under a Minister and that Minister is a member of the Executive Council.

You can, of course, ridicule anything if you are so inclined and the Civil Service is often subjected to ridicule. I have listened here to ex parte statements to make it look ridiculous. The Civil Service is growing because the Government is taking more and more into its own hands and has been arrogating to itself business that is, strictly speaking, not the Government's business at all. I admit that in times of war, practically every Government is a totalitarian Government. Senator Tierney referred to what was proposed in England with regard to the Foreign Office and the proposed staff college for civil servants. He asked if England could do that, now when she is at war, why should we not be able to do it, as if it were a desirable thing. As a matter of fact, it is done because England is at war. When a country is at war it has to placate and flatter the least responsible sections of the community in order to secure their cooperation in the war. You do not have to do that for people with a sense of responsibility. They are prepared to take their burdens and to make sacrifices for the common good.

As I read the papers, the proposals about the Foreign Office arise from the fact that there is a certain envy operating in regard to it. There has been a certain tradition created by the humorous papers that officials of the Foreign Office are members of selected families and that because they belong to a certain class they are necessarily inept and stupid. Certain people in England are playing up to that by talking about a new system.

The proposal for a staff college is based on the same feeling to my mind. During a war, as I say, every Government is a totalitarian Government. A large section in politics want to have totalitarianism then although normally they would be the first to cry out against it. It does seem that when the war is on opportunity is taken to utilise circumstances which are peculiar to a war period to make permanent certain institutions created by the war. All the proposed talk about a staff college to train technical civil servants aims at assisting the movement towards enabling the State to take over every human activity. It does seem to me, therefore, that instead of our wondering that that should be proposed in England during the war, it would be a matter of wonderment if it were not proposed.

The commission which it is proposed to set up as a result of this motion is also to inquire into what steps are desirable to increase the usefulness of the Civil Service to the community as a whole, but, first of all, you have got to make up your minds as to what is useful. I think you may say that what some people would regard as most useful might appear to others as most harmful. I think the most harmful feature of the Civil Service is that it has to interfere in so many spheres in which it should not interfere. The next part of the motion suggests that in the opinion of the Seanad the terms of reference to the commission should include an inquiry into the methods of recruitment and promotion in the Civil Service. I would exclude that. As to methods of recruitment, I do not quite know why that is included in the motion. Any person at the head of a Department must decide as to whether A or B should be promoted. There are only two ways in which promotion can be carried out.

You can have a mechanical system whereby you say a man will be elevated according to seniority or priority or according to his success in examinations. Otherwise, the man who is responsible for the work must choose or must exercise his personal judgment as to who is most suitable for promotion. You have to decide whether promotion is to be carried according to either of these methods or whether it is to be carried out by the man responsible for getting the work done. If you say "You must promote A or B", and if you still reserve the right to criticise the man responsible in the Department, it seems to me unjust.

The motion further suggests that the proposed commission should inquire into the relations of the Service with outside organisations, especially with those which deal with production or distribution. I admit that during a time of emergency it is natural that the State, because the whole existence of society which it has organised is in jeopardy, should overflow and outpass the natural limitations and boundaries of its activity. In this country that has happened already and not during a period of a world war. We had a carefully selected emergency thrust upon us in 1933 by the acts of our own Government and an enormous amount of legislation and State activity were sought to be justified on the grounds of the crisis created and precipitated by our own Government. We entered into a sphere of enormous tariffs. Now the moment you have a policy of enormous tariffs, a new situation and a new danger confront the Civil Service. Traditionally, the activity of the Civil Service is almost confined to the various branches of the Service.

It functions only within its own Department although some Departments collect taxes from people outside. But the moment a system is created, such as we had here before the present emergency, you certainly have a new situation. You have the possibility of making a man's fortune by giving an enormous tariff on some particular item that he is manufacturing or proposes to manufacture. You have the power to issue licences, and the getting of a licence or the refusal of it may make all the difference between fortune and ruin for certain people. There was a new situation there which might have called for an inquiry, but at the present moment I do not think that you need any such inquiry. You have a Minister in charge of a Department. If you are dissatisfied with anything that is being done or with the whole policy of that Department, it is the Minister who is responsible.

We are told these terrible stories about the Department of Finance, but it is not the Department of Finance that is responsible; it is the Executive Council. This discussion has rather irritated me, though I admit it is a purely personal irritation. In 1922, when this State came into existence, a number of people put forward the most scandalous propositions for consideration by the Government. Time and again I was annoyed by the assumption that all sorts of wonderful national things could be done if only our national Ministers had their way, but that behind them, surrounding them or controlling them, was an organised gang of civil servants, bitterly anti-Irish and trying to fight England's battle over again. There was that very nice charitable attempt to take from us our responsibility. I felt it was our duty at that time to tell the people that if there was anything wrong in the matter of government, it was the members of the Government who were responsible and not anything that would justify these cowardly attacks on civil servants that took place at that time.

The Ministers are responsible and, over the Ministers, the Dáil and the Seanad are responsible. If you want more money spent upon the National Museum, Parliament can vote it. If more money should be spent upon the National Museum, there is one person guilty, and that is the Minister, in that he has not brought forward any proposal in his Estimates. I should like to have an inquiry into the Civil Service to decide what its work is to be. At present there appears to be nothing that is not civil servants' work. Even before the present war, if there were certain things you wanted, you had to ask the Irish factory purporting to make those goods if they would supply them. To my own knowledge, if you wrote for a certain type of thing you got an arrogant letter from the factory saying you could not have what would suit your requirements; you must have an inferior or a different type of commodity, made by them. You then had the right to appeal for permission to import what you wanted on the ground that it was not obtainable here. Your request for a licence to import on the ground that what you wanted was not obtainable here was sent to the very interested party, who had already informed you that you must accept something you did not want, because that was what they could produce. You had this peculiar system whereby a business man was incorporated into the Civil Service. He could refuse you the licence, because it was his advice that was acted upon as to whether or not you could import what you required. By refusing you a licence, he would force you to buy from his factory what did not suit your purpose, but what suited him to give you.

I have been irritated by this discussion because it has so misrepresented things. The Department of Finance exercises control, but, if the Executive Council does not like that control, it can be withdrawn. Senator Hayes referred to certain things which should have been done, but which the Department of Finance stepped in to stop. When a Minister wants to do something, he can ask the civil servants for advice, and they should advise him, but, not in a way to flatter him, and to assure him that what he wants to do is the right thing; they can advise him frankly as to what is the best thing to do. If his judgment disagrees with theirs, he may find that what he wants to do will require the sanction of the Executive Council. He can go to his colleagues on the Executive Council and, if they refuse sanction, then they and not the civil servants are to blame. He may find in the existing state of the law that he would not be justified in spending money for a given purpose. In that way he can go to Parliament and ask for a Vote and, if he fails to get it, then it is the Minister who is to blame and not the civil servants.

We see that the work of the Civil Service is changing radically from what it was traditionally and the tendency towards some new system of recruitment, promotion and organisation in order that civil servants will do on an increasing scale the new type of work that they are doing at the moment. I would be inclined to resist this, because I recognise that, in England and all over the world, the tendency is more and more for the State to take over every activity. That is particularly so in this country and it is so in response to an unremitting clamour from outside. The farmer who complains about warble fly inspectors annoying him will, in the next breath, be asking for a State subsidy for something in which he is interested.

If you are to have the State subsidising, then the State must have control in relation to the things that are subsidised. Everyone is denouncing State interference and everyone is wanting more and more from the State. The State has to take the children to school, to teach them there and to feed them, to clothe them and to build houses for them to live in. All responsibility is being taken off the family. One speaker told us how everybody longed for power and how everybody, when that power was obtained, wanted more and more power. I do not accept that. The truth is that this aggression of the State, so universal at the moment, comes from a sense of impotence in people. They want security and they want someone else to provide it, and the only thing they can think of is this abstraction, the State. I want a smaller Civil Service, because I want less done. I believe it will be much more useful the more you tend to make it smaller. That is the problem, and that problem is not in the Civil Service but in the Ministers and in the Parliament of this country.

With a lot of what Senator Fitzgerald has said, I am in thorough agreement. From time to time, we hear appeals for help and support from the Government and then, when the estimated expenditure is presented for consideration, there are complaints about the cost. One would imagine, to hear some of the speakers this evening, that, if we had this commission of inquiry, we might, possibly, secure a Civil Service of supermen. Can anyone imagine a Civil Service of supermen controlled by a Parliament such as we have? Things are bad enough as it is, but, if we got better men, I am afraid we would have to get a much better type in the Parliament of the country.

Senator Tierney spoke, generally, on education and referred to the horrible way the Department of Finance is treating the Museum, the Institute of Advanced Studies, and so on. He never mentioned the fact that there are 300 national schools condemned as unsuitable. I do not know whether the Department of Finance or the Civil Service is responsible in that connection. I put the responsibility entirely on the members of our Parliament, because they do not take sufficient interest to bring pressure on the Minister to ensure that the great mass of the school children will have suitable schools in which to be educated. It is a terrible blot on our system that we have these unsuitable schools—a much greater blot than the fact that the mummies in the Museum are not being looked after. Much has been said about the Museum and the terrible loss it is to society. Think of the thousands of unfortunate children attending unsuitable national schools. Which is the greater evil? I suggest the little humans who are attending the unsuitable schools are more important to the nation, and they should get more attention.

I think that Senator Mrs. Concannon was very proper in her remarks, to the effect that the motion is entirely untimely. This is certainly not the time to discuss a motion of this nature about the Civil Service. Anyone who can visualise something along the lines of the Beveridge Report coming into operation in this country in the future will realise that that would mean a great extension of the Civil Service, and is there any other organisation in the country that is better fitted to deal with such a matter than the Civil Service? I doubt if there is. Then, much as Senator Sir John Keane has said about businessmen and their ability to train our civil servants along business lines, I think we ought to ask ourselves what would be our predicament if we were running our country on business lines by businessmen. It must be remembered that, mainly, a business is run for profit, and for the profit of a certain individual or individuals. Do we want to have that happen in the case of our Civil Service? I certainly do not want it, and I do not think it would be for the good of the country, generally.

I do not want to delay the House, but these are some of the ideas that occurred to me, and which were brought to my mind during the course of the debate. I think we would be much more profitably employed in debating a motion to consider the possibility of setting up a committee or commission to deal with the economic and social situation as it presents itself now, with a view to advising the Government both with regard to the present emergency and the post-war position. Then we might be able to fit into the scheme of that committee or commission the possibility of altering the Civil Service, because it might fit better into a new situation which would be more compatible with the conditions that will prevail after the war.

There is not very much time left and I do not think it will be necessary for me to take up more than about ten minutes in replying. I think that, perhaps, the most remarkable thing about this debate is that it has produced agreement between Senators Fitzgerald and Foran. I might have known that if they did agree, I was certain to disagree with them, and I certainly do, so far as this matter is concerned. The most notable —I shall not say the most remarkable—thing about the debate is that nobody, except Senator Michael Hayes, took the slightest notice of what I had said, and the last speaker showed that either he was not here when I was speaking or, at any rate, had not read what I said, because, if he had, he would have given his reasons as to why he disagreed with the point of view I put forward. However, I should just like to say that, because Senator Foran considers that after the war there will have to be drastic changes, and because he holds that we ought to have—and in this I completely agree with him—something which would be a kind of Irish Beveridge Report, to deal with Irish problems and the considerable changes that will have to be faced, he thinks that that is a reason why we should go on with the old type of Civil Service and should not take time to deal with this problem now. I hold exactly the opposite. It is because I agree with him about the changes which are inevitable, whether you like it or not, that I think some effort should be made to tackle the problem now.

I think that the peoples of the world are going to demand changes. These changes probably, will not be as radical or drastic as some people think, but if the world is to progress and if the rights and privileges of people are to be recognised, it is inevitable that changes will occur. Although I hate war and realise its evil, I also realise that war creates upheavals, and that out of these upheavals come changes, some of which are not good, but some of which are good. There are good results as well as bad results from these upheavals.

Now, the only person in the debate who dealt with the main points that were made by me, to any extent, was the Minister for Finance, and I should like to make one or two brief references to the attitude taken by him. He, first of all, suggested that I was inclined to blame the Civil Service for what really was the action of the Government. I want to make it clear that I was not blaming the Civil Service about anything. I was setting out certain things that were not perfectly satisfactory, and I said that I felt that since we were going to have to face very considerable changes in the future, this would be a good time to set up a small body—I do not care whether you call it a commission, a committee, or anything else, and I shall not follow Senator Fitzgerald in his remarks about the exact wording of the motion —to prepare for such changes. Whether you like it or not, the Government— whether it be a one-Party Government, a national Government, or whatever you like to call it—cannot carry out the wishes of the people it represents except, to a very great extent, through the Civil Service.

I believe that we have in the Civil Service a surprisingly large amount of ability, working, in many respects, under antiquated rules and machinery. I think that there is the danger with regard to the Civil Service, as in most businesses, and particularly the larger businesses, that you cannot see the wood for the trees inside. Where you cannot get the reform from inside, even with the best will in the world, in such cases, the bringing in of fresh minds will lead very often to changes and improvements which could not be achieved—at any rate, in the same length of time— from inside. The Minister for Finance said that the Civil Service is slow, must be slow, and will always be slow. That may be correct, or it may not. I cannot accept a statement of that kind, at any rate until I have done my best to see if the position can be remedied. We have at present—whether it is a matter of necessity or not may be arguable—a very considerable amount of Government control and inter-governmental negotiation on vital matters, such as trade, agriculture, supplies, and so on, which are not necessarily matters of individual profit, but rather of the carrying on of the business of the country and obtaining its necessary supplies. I suggest that, at any rate, for some years after the war, the main supplies of the world will be in the control of a number of governments and that individual governments, will be under a considerable amount of international control. In such circumstances, I do not think it is safe to allow this method of passing things on from the bottom to the top— taking perhaps two or three weeks before a decision can be made—to go on. In the matter of supplies during a war, slowness often means loss.

I am not suggesting that it is always the case, but where slowness means nothing being done, I would far rather see a responsible individual given the opportunity, as he would have in an ordinary business, of making the best decision that he could and getting something done, even if he made mistakes, and I think that anyone who listened to me or who read my speech would find that I would be in favour of some scheme of modifying the present system of Parliamentary Question and Answer—not that I would be in favour of its abolition— whereby a particular individual would be protected from blame in connection with any decisions he might make. I think that the whole matter demands consideration and a certain amount of overhaul.

As I have said, I am not concerned about the exact wording of the resolution. I should like to see a small committee, commission, inquiry or whatever you like to call it, set up, which, unlike the last Brennan Commission, would hear evidence from outside as well as from inside as to the problems facing the Civil Service and which would show whether it is not possible to institute definite improvements. I think it is just as important to check over and to examine your Civil Service at least every ten years as it is to provide, as is provided in the Constitution, that the constituencies, and the number of voters in the constituencies, shall be overhauled. The voters' list is important and the representation is important, if you have democracy. Why? Simply in order that your Parliament will be as representative as possible. But the representative character of your Parliament will fail unless you have a Government responsible to it, and that will fail unless you have the best Civil Service you can get, one which is responsible to the Ministers and which is carrying out what Ministers want in the best way.

I am satisfied that in most Departments of our Civil Service there are systems in vogue which have been in vogue for a very considerable time. I do not say they are bad—all I say is that they require investigation to see if they cannot be improved. The idea that you cannot do it during a war, or at this particular time, is, I think, a mistake. I do not attach much importance to what may or may not be done in England, but it is interesting that this whole question has been raised there and a committee of inquiry much on the lines I suggest was promised I think, last week, by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The line of the criticism which has been made there, while in many respects rather different from the line I take, has a good deal in common with it. That is not necessarily a guide to us, but I think Senator Concannon is completely wrong if she thinks that, during the war in England, there are a lot of suitable and important people whose time is not fully taken up and that here suitable and proper people are fully engaged.

Men from whom to choose.

I take the opposite view. I would say that the suitable people in England are fully occupied, while here you have quite a number of able and suitable people who are by no means fully occupied. However, that is a matter in respect of which there can be a difference of opinion.

One other matter—the question of financial control—was referred to today. I do not see how you can avoid financial control of Departments, but I have never been in favour of what is called in England "Treasury control", which we took over from England. I was on the first Constitution Committee which gave this matter a considerable amount of attention. We had two professors who addressed us at considerable length—one from the National University and one from Trinity College. The professor from the National University believed that the British Treasury system was the best ever devised, with the greatest possible advantages, and was very strongly in favour of it, while the professor from Trinity College said it worked in England simply because there was a tradition, that it was inherently bad and that the French system of the Court of Accounts would be far better for this country.

I was very much inclined to the view taken by the gentleman from Trinity College and I do not think that in a small State like this the system of Treasury control which we have at the moment works as it ought to work. That does not mean that we should not have financial control, but I do not think you want control by another Department of every detail, and it is this control of small details, as distinct from control of the total expenditure, which works badly. If Parliament votes a certain sum of money for a Department, or for the mummies in the Museum, if you like, the amount must be restricted to the amount voted by Parliament, but the official in charge, to my mind, ought to have full power to make economies in one direction and to spend the saving in another direction. At present, if he wants to spend half-a-crown outside the amount sanctioned, he has to get Treasury sanction. If he continues to spend what has been voted, even though he knows there could be economies, it will not cause him any trouble.

I was also chairman of the Post Office Commission and, in spite of what has been said about commissions, I think they can still do good, although our recommendations have not yet been fully accepted, but they may some day. I, again, very definitely formed the opinion that detailed control by another Department of almost every item of expenditure is a bad system, but control of the larger items by the Department of Finance, which is looking for economies and, at the same time, seeing to it that the Parliamentary Vote is not exceeded, is absolutely essential.

There is a kind of irksomeness in the feeling that every single detail is being watched, and if anyone would care to read the book mentioned by Senator Goulding, Passed to You, Please, he will find extremely humorous, but, I have no doubt, perfectly true, illustrations of what may happen. I am convinced that a useful purpose would be served by a committee of inquiry, sitting in private, though its evidence and report would be published, through which members of the public would get an opportunity of stating, knowing that they would be considered, the problems they feel exist and which have to be dealt with by the State at present and of ascertaining how best the Civil Service could help.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.
The Seanad adjourned at 9.10 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Thursday, 11th February.
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