Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 23 Feb 1983

Vol. 100 No. 1

Local Authorities (Officers and Employees) Bill, 1982: Second Stage.

Question proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

Minister of State at the Department of the Environment (Mr. Quinn)

The Local Appointments Commissioners have established an unrivalled record for fairness in making selections for posts since they were established over 50 years ago. From time to time the legislative provisions under which they operate require up-dating to ensure that the statutory framework under which they operate is absolutely clear-cut. This is the aim of the current proposals.

The main purpose of this Bill is to enable the Local Appointments Commissioners to resume their practice of awarding credit for a knowledge of Irish when selecting or recommending candidates for posts in local authorities, health boards and other bodies. The Bill will also clarify and confirm the Commissions' powers in relation to the selection of candidates and will provide a statutory basis for the making of regulations by the Commissioners in connection with the conduct of competitions.

The Bill will also make statutory provision for the non-application of the Local Authorities (Officers and Employees) Act, 1926, to posts of town clerk in smaller urban district councils.

Since 1974 it has been Government policy that for entry to the public service, Irish and English are of equal value and candidates showing proficiency in both languages get credit for this. The Commissioners were implementing that policy by awarding credit to candidates for proficiency in both languages. This was in line with the policy and practice in relation to competitions conducted by the Civil Service Commissioners.

In December 1979 the Supreme Court decided on appeal that the Commissioners had acted beyond their powers in granting extra credit for a knowledge of Irish to candidates being selected and recommended by them for appointment. As a result of the court decision the Local Appointments Commissioners had no option but to suspend the award of such credit. This Bill will enable the Commissioners to resume the grant of such credit in accordance with Government policy and, indeed, I should add successive Government policy on this point.

Up to the time of the Supreme Court finding the Commissioners had in the normal process of selection given regard to training, knowledge and experience over and above the minimum qualifictions for the particular post being filled. This was necessary to ensure that the best qualified and most suitable candidate was selected, as the basic qualifications for an office are, by definition, minimum qualifications. However, in the light of the terms of the court decision it is considered necessary to provide explicit legislative cover for the Commissioners' practice in this regard and section 2 of the Bill is designed to meet this.

It is also considered desirable to spell out beyond doubt the exact powers of the Commissioners in the area of selecting candidates. The Commissioners' powers to select candidates are set out under sections 8 and 9 of the Local Authorities (Officers and Employees) Act, 1926, and section 29 of the Local Government Act, 1955. These provide that selection shall be by competitive examination. This has been interpreted as meaning written examination. When this is not feasible, as happens in practically every case, selection may, with the consent of the appropriate Minister, be in such manner as the commissioners think proper.

In practice the commissioners use the services of interview boards to assist them in their selection of candidates. It is felt that the procedure adopted by the Civil Service Commissioners is the most appropriate for spelling out the exact powers of the Local Appointments Commissioners in the area of selecting candidates, and sections 3 and 4 of the Bill have been modelled on corresponding provisions in the Civil Service Commissioners Act, 1956. These provide that selection shall be by competition consisting of one or more specified types of tests. They cover also the short-listing of candidates and the making of regulations by the commissioners in relation to the holding of such competition.

In addition to the foregoing proposals, which arise out of the Supreme Court decision, problems have existed for some time in relation to posts of town clerk in the smaller urban district councils. Selection for the filling of these is made by the Local Appointments Commissioners under the provisions of the Local Authorities (Officers and Employees) Act, 1926. There is a very high turnover in these posts and over the years representations have been made by the elected councils concerned and others to have them filled by local competition which would of course be open to all qualified candidates. This would reduce somewhat the degree of turnover in such posts and would reduce the delay which is necessarily involved in competitions held at national level.

This issue was raised in the course of discussions between management and staff side interests under the conciliation and arbitration scheme for local authorities and health services on the grading, salaries and other matters related to town clerks generally. At that time it was agreed to recommend that when a suitable opportunity arose proposals should be formulated for incorporation in legislation whereby town clerk posts in urban district councils with a population of less than 9,000 would no longer be filled on the recommendation of the Local Appointments Commissioners.

Section 6 of the Bill provides for this by excluding these town clerk posts from the scope of the Local Authorities (Officers and Employees) Act, 1926. While this proposal does not arise because of the court case, it is felt that the opportunity presented by the present legislative proposals should be availed of to effect the necessary change. I commend the Bill to the House.

Mr. M. O'Toole

This is a resumption of the practice of giving additional credits for the official languages. It was a decision of the Supreme Court to discontinue the practice by the Local Appointments Commissioners of giving credit for the national tongue at interviews. A person who had not got a knowledge of Irish could get a job under the decision of the Supreme Court and then be asked to take up a position in a Gaeltacht area or a part Gaeltacht area along the west coastline. That person might not be the most suitable choice for that area. That has been the case in the interim period since the decision of the Supreme Court. I welcome the decision to give recognition and credit under the Bill to people qualified in both languages.

I compliment the Local Appointments Commission on their selection of candidates with the academic requirements and suitability for the job but it does not always follow that a candidate selected for a particular field of administration is suitable effectively to carry out his duties in a practical way. I am sure most of the people here who have worked in local government have seen selections made by the Local Appointments Commission on an impartial basis but when the person appointed went into the field of administration he was highly unsuitable for the job. We see this from day to day both in planning and local government appointments. While I acknowledge the impartiality of the Local Appointments Commission in their judgment and in their selections, very often the candidate is not suitable in the field of administration. Emphasis should be placed on this aspect of selection. That is a very valid point.

This Bill was inherited by the Minister. I am in full agreement with it. I welcome the decision to revert back to the old system which worked very well. With all due respect to the judicial people, they found a loophole and took a decision in connection with a particular case. One swallow never made a summer. Indeed, there are three urban councils in my own county and you would want to ring up daily to find out who is the town clerk because a temporary system was in operation when the county council were seconding people to take up the duties of town clerks in the three urban areas of Mayo. Some legal man felt that it was wrong to take Irish into consideration or to give credit for it at a particular interview. That is what happened, and it does not augur well for the proper administration of any urban area to have town clerks passing through as fast as they were passing through in my county and throughout the country. A town clerk with some measure of permanency has a certain amount of incentive to carry out some worth-while duties for the town or urban district he is administering. For that reason I welcome the Bill and I support it.

Professor Dooge

The Minister has been welcomed earlier but may I add my personal welcome to him? The Bill also is to be welcomed because it deals with certain defects in the present legislation which are now being remedied. It is also welcome because it gives us an opportunity in this House to express our opinion of the Local Appointments Commission and of its work.

The defects which are remedied by this Bill are small matters: the question of giving additional credit for Irish in posts where it is not an essential qualification, the freedom of the Local Appointments Commission in relation to the type of competition, the making of regulations in regard to screening and short listing, and this problem of the revolving town clerks.

That these defects have been found is perhaps an indication to us in this House, and to those in another House, of how careful we must be in regard to the legislation which we process here each sitting day. I understand that much of the problem in regard to the defects we are now dealing with arose because in a particular enactment instead of using the original formula of, and I quote, "select by such means and in such manner", this was replaced by the shorter phrase "select in such manner". In this case brevity might have been the soul of wit but it brought us all to the Supreme Court. It is a salutary lesson for us in this regard.

This brings me to make a more general comment. In dealing with complex legislation of this type, is our system of a debate in principle on Second Stage followed by the type of Committee Stage which we have really appropriate having regard to the complexities of the type of legislation which we have? I have said many times that we should meet in a more informal situation, not just from the policy point of view, but from the point of view of the very wording. It is not just that we need the experts there when we are deciding what we want to do with a particular measure. We really need a parliamentary draftsman there to see how we are going to do what we want to do. This is something that we must all keep in mind.

What is being done in this Bill is something with which we all agree. The question of extra credit for Irish is in line with Government policy. I wish to make a comment with regard to this. I suggest that it should be perfectly clear how much credit is being given. One of the criticisms of the practice of giving additional credit for Irish in the Civil Service Commission and the Local Appointments Commission is that it is often a great mystery. I have been a Member of this House for 20 years and I have not sat on an appointment board in that time. But when I did, and it was many times, there were difficulties because it was a "hush-hush" business. The interview board looked at people's qualifications and suitability. This was all taken away and something was done behind the rood-screen in some holy of holies. The procedure should be more open. It may well be that this is something that is now part of the practice of the Local Appointments Commission, and if so I am very glad to hear it. If it is not I urge that it should become so. Otherwise it becomes an irritant to the candidate and to the members of the interview board.

There are divided views in regard to the question of screening and shortlisting. There are many cases in which this has to be done. Even in some quite senior posts interviews have gone on for three weeks at a time, so much so that the interview board, when they come to their final decision, had to look back at photographs of candidates to try to recall people whom they had interviewed two and a half weeks beforehand. In a situation that witnessed great mobility, we should have a large number of people coming up for separate jobs at frequent intervals. There is a case for shortlisting. As long as there is some procedure whereby people who feel that they have been wrongly left off a shortlist can demand their rights to be interviewed, they should not be allowed to do this in such a way as to clog up the whole machinery of appointments or indeed to involve the Local Appointments Commission in an undue amount of expense. In this connection I would like to ask the Minister what is the position in regard to the question of fees for entry for local appointments competitions and the question of possible special fees for those who are left off the shortlist but appeal to be placed on the list for interview.

In regard to the general assessment of the Local Appointments Commission we can say that this was one of the fine achievements of our Government, an achievement which started very shortly after self-government and something which old mother England has not yet caught up with. If we look at the way in which our local officials have been appointed for over 50 years and look at the situation still among the local authorities in Britain, we realise that in this instance we have been far ahead of the times. It is interesting to recall that this question of the Local Appointments Commission and the Civil Service Commission, was there from the beginning. In fact, at the first annual conference of Sinn Féin which was held in 1905 in the Rotunda this system was advocated by Arthur Griffith. He treated it as one of the keystones of the Sinn Féin policy. In the very interesting time of the Dáil Department of Local Government under Mr. W.T. Cosgrave, one of the few Departments of Dáil Éireann prior to the Treaty which was successful, one of the things which was done was the investigation into such a scheme. It may be of interest to Senators that it was someone who for many years was a Member of this House, the late Michael Hayes, who, on emerging from prison in 1921, was asked by Mr. W.T. Cosgrave to sit down and prepare for Dáil Éireann in those pre-Treaty days a scheme for local appointments. It was probably appropriate then that Michael Hayes became the first chairman of the Civil Service Commission as Ceann Comhairle, and it was only the pressure of the work as Ceann Comhairle and as Chairman of the Civil Service Commission that led him to refuse the chairmanship of the first Local Appointments Commission.

We all recognise the advantages of the LAC. They have developed a very great expertise. It is, by the fact that their methods are recognised and well-known, attractive to candidates and produces an attractive pool of candidates for important posts. It is efficient in regard to the fact that it can reduce the cost of advertising due to the manner in which it operates. Above all their great advantage has been the way in which they have produced mobility in the local authority service. This is a really colossal achievement. We can look back in the bound volumes of Dublin Opinion, and find there a cartoon depicting an urban council meeting. One man is thumping the table and saying, “Are we as patriots going to stand still and not speak out against a man from the next parish being appointed as our dispensary doctor?” That was an exaggeration of the spirit that was there before the Local Appointments Commission but not a complete exaggeration. Now we have a system that has given confidence to people that they are able to make a career on merit. We have had this for over 50 years, not just in the purely administrative jobs but also in the jobs of my own profession of engineering, the Minister's profession of architecture and the medical profession. This has had a remarkable effect and has given this mobility, so much so that when the Institute of Public Administration produced a report on mobility in the public service as a whole it pointed to what had been achieved in the local authority sector as a model for the civil service and for the remainder of the public sector. In comparison, the disadvantages of the Local Appointments Commission system are relatively minor. In fairness, it must be said that many of the complaints that have been made against them down through the years have been remedied. In particular, there has been the complaint of delay. This has been a persistent complaint down through the years, but my impression is that this is not so loud or so frequent a complaint nowadays as it was. It seems they have managed to overcome many of the difficulties in this regard.

Acknowledging that the Local Appointments Commission have been this very distinct success, do we just accept that and leave it there? I would suggest to the Minister, no. I would suggest to him that accepting that the Local Appointments Commission have been a singular success, it is time to look at the whole question of the public sector. There was an interdepartmental report some years ago, but, like many interdepartmental reports, it somehow got lost. It certainly is lost in regard to any effect that it might have. There have been close ties between the Civil Service Commission and the Local Appointments Commission since the twenties. There are close ties between the staff who are working for the Civil Service Commission and the Local Appointments Commission. I think that we need mobility throughout the whole public service. This is something that we need if we are to move forward. If we are to set our whole economy on a firmer basis, if we are to come through the great troubles that now beset us, one of the things that will be a potent weapon in our struggle will be the promotion of mobility throughout the public sector. This mobility being achieved so readily by means of the Local Appointments Commission, then we should certainly look at whether it is time to consider once again the question as to whether there should be a public sector commission. There are, of course, arguments on both sides. I am not coming down necessarily for a unified body, but I am saying that it is something we must look at.

The Minister said in his introductory speech that his aim was to make the statutory framework absolutely clear. I agree that that is an admirable aim, but has the Minister really achieved it? If he looks at his own Bill he will see again legislation by reference. He has on the face of the Bill ten Acts referred to in the Bill. There are another ten not referred to in the Bill that also affect the work of the Local Appointments Commission. I know that it is necessary to come forward as quickly as possible and to remedy defects where defects exist, but there is a very strong case here for attempting to consolidate the legislation. If the aim is to make the framework absolutely clear, it should be clear to legislators.

I return now to the point that I made earlier. Unless legislation is clear to legislators then we cannot do our job properly. I know this takes time and is difficult, but I appeal in regard to this Act and indeed to many more that there is a case here for consolidation. I would like to echo something which I have said many times and which Senator Eoin Ryan has also said many times in this Chamber, that if we could get away from legislation by reference we would be doing a better job. The law would be clear to us as we enact it. The law should be clear to the people for whom it is enacted. We have examples in many of the countries of Europe where every Bill which comes forward is a Consolidation Bill. This also is something to which I would ask the Minister to give his mind. Meanwhile, the legislation that he does bring forward to remedy defects that have been found is indeed welcome.

Professor Hillery

I would like to join in the welcome to Deputy Ruairí Quinn to the Seanad and to congratulate him on his appointment as Minister of State. I wish to focus briefly on those sections of the Bill relating to the criteria to be used by the Local Appointments Commissioners in selecting staff. The importance of appropriate selection techniques cannot be over-stressed. When we look at poor selections it can have very serious consequences, especially when we consider the reality that it is difficult to dispense with the services of an employee who turns out to be a problem, or unsatisfactory.

The trade union attitude, generally speaking, is that selection is the employer's prerogative and that if an employee proves unsatisfactory then it is up to the employers to put up with the consequences. Great care is taken by many organisations in purchasing, for example, a very expensive piece of equipment. A recruitment decision, however, demands particular care when viewed in monetary terms because it involves an investment decision of hundreds of thousands of pounds over the lifetime of an employee. Looked at from the point of a misfit or a dissatisfied employee, he may find himself locked into a job for life. His dissatisfaction with his lot may result in, for example, a poor quality of work which in turn may affect the standard of work by those with whom he works in a group and also may lead to bad industrial relations.

Turning specifically to the question of selection in the local government service, I hope that the expanded selection criteria proposed in the Bill will be used further to integrate professional and administrative grades. This dual structure, whereby professional people give advice to administrators who are of course, the decision-makers, greatly reduces the prospects of, for example, engineers, architects and town planners ever achieving a top administrative post like county manager. This is an unhealthy and unwise situation. In fairness to the local government service, however, they have made considerably more progress in integrating professional, technical and administrative grades than in the case of central Government. By intensifying their efforts in integrating these grades, the local government service could set a very valuable headline for the civil service.

I urge the continuation of competition for selection of senior posts rather than relying on the criterion of seniority alone. Merit — and this has already been touched upon — should be the dominant criterion in the selection of staff for all grades of officers and employees and, in the case of public servants in particular, personal qualities like diligence and courtesy should carry at least as much weight as formal qualifications.

Mr. O'Mahony

I, too, welcome the Minister to the House and congratulate him on his appointment. I look forward to a very fruitful contribution from him in the period ahead.

Since I came to the Seanad a reasonably short time ago I have tried to make it a habit not to speak about matters about which I have little or no knowledge. I am making an exception this evening to intervene very briefly in this area of local authority appointments, an area about which I have virtually no knowledge. However, it has been drawn to my attention that there is concern among officials of middle to senior management levels in local authorities about the composition of some interview boards. That is not to question the integrity of the membership of the interview boards concerned — I want to stress that quite clearly and carefully. The concern is rather that it appears occasionally that the interview boards are comprised of people of equivalent rank to the post which is to be filled or sometimes a rank below it. This, apparently, is causing concern to local authority officials who are competing for these posts, since they feel it reflects in some way an attitude on the part of the civil service that the local authority appointments are not quite as important as they might be. The view has been expressed to me, and I would like to put it to the Minister for consideration in the context of implementing this legislation, that it might be considered that, in future, interview boards should be comprised of personnel of a rank at least one step above the post which is to be filled. I do not wish to continue on that point. It is one that has been drawn to my attention and I would in turn wish to draw it to the attention of the Minister.

Mr. O'Leary

I do not want to speak at any great length on the Second Stage of this Bill. I think Senator Dooge and others have covered the general precedents of the Bill very well. This is one of the rare opportunities we get of discussing the work of the Local Appointments Commission, and one problem which has been notable over the last 15 years and, in particular during the period of time when I was a member of local authority, which was the first ten years of that 15 years, needs to be ventilated in the House.

The appointments in local authority offices take place on the undeniably fair criterion of merit. The problem of the parochial difficulties which would arise in the absence of a Local Appointments Commission has largely been overcome, but this has been done at a considerable price and is particularly noticeable when employment prospects in the local authorities are good. It may not be quite as big a problem this year as it has been in the past but, no doubt, as employment prospects improve, it will again be a problem.

It appears that the Local Appointments Commission feel themselves unable to consider the strategic importance of the appointments which they are making to the particular local authority. In other words, they seem to fail to take into account the necessity for stability in local authorities, and a well qualified person can successively apply and be appointed to a large variety of posts in different local authorities. That gives rise to a high turnover of officials and a problem, particularly where employment prospects are good, that the local authorities, especially those who might be described as less fashionable, do not have a permanent technical or administrative staff but a technical or administrative staff that are passing through for the time being.

Because the Local Appointments Commission have done this on a national basis, if they are asked to appoint something to the Clare County Council they cannot say "there is a need for stability in Clare County Council, if we appoint candidate E we know he is also an applicant for the job in Dublin and when he gets that job he will immediately leave Clare County Council". The position will develop over a period of time which is similar to what happened as regards the small urban authorities and their town clerk. It applied even more fundamentally to important positions in local authority and, therefore, in the consideration of further legislation in this area and the criteria to be examined, some consideration of the needs of the new employer, plus the needs of the old employer, is necessary. I recognise that in doing that you are limiting the freedom of action of the individual who is making the application, and that is why it is very difficult to do and why it must be done with great delicacy and consultation with all the interests involved.

While the Local Appointments Commission have been very successful, it has given rise to a situation where nobody is charged with the responsibility of looking at these appointments on a strategic basis so as to get a degree of permanence and policy consistency throughout local authorities which is necessary for the implementation of their many important schemes.

Mr. Lanigan

There is no doubt that we have had an impartial consideration by the Local Appointments Commission of all appointments which they make. It often appears to me that expertise from outside the local authorities system and the civil service should be brought into the appointments commission because, in too many cases, as has been suggested by Senator O'Leary, the people on the appointments commission might be interviewing a particular engineer whom they might want to get back to their own county, so they place him in another county where they can get him into a position for promotion. You have technical people from within the local authorities sitting on selection committees and you might get a very enthusiastic engineer in a particular county who goes for a job in another county and he finds he does not get it. There is another appointment coming up in some other county and the same members of the appointments commission are on the interview board again. You can get a very enthusiastic young engineer going around the country for every position that comes up, the same people are interviewing him and eventually they get fed up with looking at him and he gets fed up looking at them. He either stagnates in the job in the local authority or he gets out of it.

Another point often forgotten by the Local Appointments Commission is that most people who work for local authorities have to meet the public to a larger degree than technical people in other industries. I do not want to get myself into trouble here, but it is often felt by people who approach officers of local bodies that they do not get the courtesies they expect. The public relations aspect of appointments should be taken much more carefully into consideration than has heretofore been the case. A member of the public who goes to a local authority is generally in trouble of some description or he is looking for something that might or might not be contentious. He should be met in a courteous manner but, unfortunately, that does not always happen.

Minister of State at the Department of the Environment (Mr. Quinn)

I would like to thank the Senators for their contributions which were significantly different from those made in the other House. It is a comment I am not supposed to make but I cannot avoid making it. If I can intrude on an earlier part of the discussion today, my personal view is that this House is very suitable for the initiation of legislation, because it gets a kind of consideration, maybe partisan, but nevertheless a measured consideration that frequently preoccupations in the other House do not provide for. We are committed to a legislative programme and I hope to see much of that legislation being initiated in this House.

Senator O'Toole welcomed the Bill and the reconfirmation of the role of the Irish language within our system as an official language of the State but particularly for those areas where people wish to conduct their business in Irish or, alternatively, where a working knowledge of the language is effectively essential if we are to give effect to the objectives of the political parties and of successive administrations in the consolidation of the restoration of the language.

Senator Dooge displayed yet again his detailed knowledge in a substantive way of the entire operation of this area, and I welcome many of the points he made. The question of consolidation is a bigger matter than this legislation. I am not passing the buck, but in this regard the responsibility now is that of the Minister for the Public Service. However, I have taken note of his proposal and I believe it is something that the Government in toto could look at. It does not just stop at the Government. Indeed the reform of the Oireachtas in general, and specifically of both Houses, could have permanent committees of consolidation doing the kind of work directly with the parliamentary draftsmen, regularly to update and upgrade legislation so that Members of the Oireachtas, or people who have to look at what the Oireachtas enacts, can clearly see that they are looking at the entire body of legislation in a particular area and not have to go rooting through other laws and references. The point is well made, and certainly it has been taken by me.

Regarding the last point made by Senator Lanigan, of the doubt raised in people's minds regarding how many points are granted for Irish and, if so, how the actual system works, my understanding of the system — and I was only once before a Local Appointments Commission for an interview post with a local authority — is that the interview board is comprised of public sector personnel and also professionals from outside. It is not confined to a closed shop of public servants. Where appropriate and when necessary the commissioners request people with the necessary external qualifications working in the private sector to participate in the board and to use their judgment in helping the board to select the best qualified candidate.

On the question of Irish, such a board is never allowed to know which of the candidates it has interviewed has even applied to take the Irish language exam, or what marks they may get for fear it might unduly influence what is their task, which is to assess the competence and qualifications of the applicants in other areas. The figures, such as I have them, are assessed on the basis of competence of the Irish language, where 6 per cent is granted, and for a good knowledge of the language 3 per cent is granted. I am assuming here that the 6 per cent mentioned is out of 100 per cent rather than getting 106 per cent or 103 per cent as used sometimes to be the case in leaving certificate mathematics, where if a student did the examination through Irish he could get 110 per cent. That is the situation in relation to Irish.

I am particularly attracted to the idea of mobility within the public service generally. I would go further and look for the kind of mobility that the French were able to achieve in the Fourth Republic between the public and private sector where you could in fact have people moving in and out. The only kind of mobility of that kind that exists at the moment is in the political sphere and not in the civil service sphere. If we could extend the same degree of mobility into the civil service, some of us might make very good civil servants and some of the civil servants might make excellent politicians.

The principle of mobility is something that in a small society like ours with limited resources we should encourage, and in so far as this legislation provides for that, I would welcome it. However, it does cut across at 180 degrees the kind of argument which Senator O'Leary was making for the local man. He virtually paraphrased the cartoon described from Dublin Opinion. A balance between the two at the relative level and scale, is what we are looking for — and I think a balance has been found in the legislation in relation to town clerks. The situation there was notorious, as Senator O'Toole said. There were town clerks moving virtually permanently all the time from post to post trying to get a permanent position and then applying for something else. It meant that substantial towns, for example, towns the size of Trim and Navan, would have a local person who found himself acting as the temporary clerk. He would go for the appointment when it became vacant but he would not be successful. Somebody from, dare I say it, Cork would be appointed to the post and he would no sooner get the post in Trim but would want to get transferred to a vacancy that had arisen in Midleton and would possibly apply for that. Eventually after three or four vacancies, the local man in Trim, who simply wanted to be the town clerk of Trim, would eventually get the job and there would be stability there for the duration until perhaps he proved his worth and was promoted to be county manager of Cork or whatever. The instability in the system was such that, as Deputy Frank McLoughlin mentioned in his own County Meath, one simply did not know who was going to be the town clerk every time one went into the local authority.

I think most Deputies and Senators from provincial Ireland recognise the kind of problems this generated, and by definition, the lack of commitment such an office-holder would have to the development of the town and to the promotion of industrial development, tourism or amenities in the town. The change that we are making in this legislation, which follows agreed consultations with unions and personnel people in the Department through the C and A system, is one that I think is welcome.

I think on that point Senator Hillery from his own expert knowledge as Professor of Industrial Relations in UCD brought to bear the kind of thinking that is now needed in assessing the suitability of people in such positions. Frequently civil servants at all grades, both technical and administrative, have now got to have skills which perhaps were not as critical or were not as important in previous times. The transformation in social attitudes, the equalisation and democratisation of attitudes, both in the women's movement and the youth movement which has removed the traditional hierarchial pyramid between grandchild and grandparent and indeed father and child has not, in my view, been adequately reflected in the way in which we relate to each other in administrations. You can get into conflict, I believe, when people who operate a 19th century pyramid structure of human relations within any kind of organisation run into difficulties, when relations in the outside world frequently have become quite different. To that extent I think the personal qualities to which Senator Hillery referred of diligence, commitment and civility are factors that should be taken into account by any interview board. Having made those kind of comments I want to stress because of the impartiality of the Local Appointments Commissioners and the legislation which was set up to establish them, this Department and myself, and successive office-holders before me and those who will come after us, have no role in this area, nor should we have. I know the commissioners will read the debates in both Houses and as I expect any intelligent group of people would do, will have regard to the considered points that have been made by all sides in this House.

The comment that was made by Senator Flor O'Mahony is something that requires a certain degree of sensitivity. If people are applying for a post of a certain grade or a certain seniority, within the constraints of available resources and available personnel for interviews I think people charged with making that selection should ensure not only that the interview board is competent and proficient in what it does but also that it is comprised of people of a suitable grade and rank so as not to complicate or to add to the difficulties. If concern exists about this matter — I am given to understand that it is there among some sections of the local authority structure — then perhaps this is an opportunity for the Oireachtas to acknowledge that it is there and to trust that the Local Appointments Commission themselves will take whatever necessary steps they consider appropriate to remove that concern.

All of us are agreed that the success of the Local Appointments Commission has been considerable particularly against the background in which they were established. Professor Dooge referred to Mr. Michael Hayes. It might interest him to know that we still have the original circulars that were drafted by him in the Book of Circulars in the Department of the Environment in the Custom House. It is one of the major achievements of our society. Perhaps after 60 years we should be as much concerned now with effectiveness, efficiency and suitability as the founding fathers were with impartiality, because things move at a faster pace now.

In reply to an earlier question by Senator Dooge as to the normal time span, I am given to understand that it is approximately six months depending on the post and I do not think it is possible to speed it up a lot more. A month is given for advertisements, one to two months for getting in references, for interview procedures and then allowing the person time to give their notice of at least a month on the other side. There is a minimum amount of time below which it is not possible to go unless you want to introduce a degree of mobility that would wreak havoc with our industrial relations in the public sector, which I do not think is the proposal.

In making those points I would like to thank all contributors in this debate for their personal good wishes and for the constructive way in which they dealt with this measure. I would like, therefore, to propose agreement to Second Stage.

Question put and agreed to.

Agreed to take remaining Stages today.