Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 19 June 2012
273 Deputy Brendan Ryan asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform further to retired public servants being re-engaged by Department for specific tasks or assignments, his plans to end this practice on a short-term and phased basis. [29783/12]
View answerAs I have previously stated in my reply to Parliamentary Question number 28316/12, the general policy with regard to the re-engagement of retired public servants is that staff should not be retained beyond retirement age and any re-engagement should be kept as limited as possible and should be for a very restricted period. In any big organisation situations can arise where a particular issue requires a short-term specialist input in order to complete a task. In many instances the most appropriate and cost-effective way of solving a short-term problem is to bring in someone who has worked in the area, understands the background and can hit the ground running.
The Strategic Workforce Planning Groups in each sector, including my own Department, are currently ensuring that sectoral employers develop plans to deal on an ongoing basis with the operational and strategic consequences arising from the reductions in public service staffing numbers including, inter alia, the lose of corporate memory and experience. Clearly, the issue of the re-engagement of retired public servants falls within the broad remit of Workforce Planning and an absolute prohibition may not be appropriate in all cases. Furthermore, I understand that in the vast majority of cases these re-hires are very short-term and project specific and the expense of any more formal selection process which would generally take longer than the time needed to solve the actual problem, as well as using up more staff time away from actual service delivery could not be justified.
