In all sorts of Departments. Of these, some 89 were really special certifications. There were 53 posts of a professional or technical character which were filled by selection boards. These were ordinary appointments and did not come into the category I am dealing with. There were thirty-six others, five of which were cases where an official was already in the service and was promoted exceptionally because of special qualifications. There were 31 appointments that were made before the Civil Service Commissioners and their selection board machinery came into being. Of the five special promotions, there was a draftsman in the Post Office, a copyist in the Public Record Office, a sorting clerk and telegraphist, and a telephonist. There were long service certifications of twelve people. These were people who had considerable service and to whom promises of establishment had been given by the British authorities, and these promises were honoured by our Civil Service Commission.
We had 32 cases of civil servants transferred from the British and Northern Governments. Then we had 92 cases of certification where people were transferred from the Congested Districts Board to the Land Commission. When the Congested Districts Board was being abolished and the staff and work was being transferred to the Land Commission it was promised in the Dáil that those permanent officials of the Congested Districts Board who were taken over would be established. Then there were nine cases of reinstatement of persons victimised whose cases were not covered by our Superannuation Act. Some of them were people who were late. One was a woman who had been in the Civil Service, who had married and resigned, but who became a widow and was certified back. Then there were six certifications in the public interest. There were simply six people the grounds for whose certification were services of a public nature or, if you like to call it, as it was to some extent, a political nature, but not political in the ordinary party sense. They were services of a definitely specific character. There were simply these six certifications, and of the others who have become established by this method, there were just thirty-one who were appointed before the Civil Service Commission and the Selection Board machinery came into being. Just so far as there was an exercise of patronage by the Government these thirty-one people represent the exercise of patronage that the Government has indulged in, and as a matter of fact I do not know whether any of them were cases of an exercise of patronage. I know of some of the appointments and I know that they were made absolutely without any sort of personal interest in individuals. We had people like the Roads Inspector of the Local Government Department and the Secretary of the Central Savings Committee. The latter was a temporary British civil servant who had experience in dealing with savings certificates, but being a temporary British civil servant he was not transferred in the ordinary way and therefore he had to be specially dealt with. There were a certain number of young university men who were taken in and who were employed in various offices quite early in the life of the Provisional Government, and it was felt that they had proved their value when they had been three or four years at work, and that after that time they were not in a position to compete on any sort of fair basis in an examination with men who were fresh from their classes. It was therefore felt that in fairness they should be certified. Then there was the Director of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture.
I do not think that any of the thirty-one appointments could be described as patronage appointments in any sense that could be held to be at all objectionable. As a matter of fact, if all appointments were to be made on the basis on which these appointments were made they could not be objected to at all on the grounds of patronage. In addition to the cases I have mentioned there were certain members of the Oireachtas staff, the clerk and the assistant clerk, principal clerk, ushers and reporters of the Oireachtas staff. In general, at any rate, the position is that so far as this Government was concerned it might be said, broadly, that there was no exercise of patronage, there was no filling of public offices with the personal or political friends of Ministers. Certain people who had given exceptional services, who had made exceptional sacrifices during the struggle for national freedom, were specially brought into the public service, but the number was infinitesimal. As regards temporary servants, every effort was made when temporary staffs were being recruited to give preference to men who had given service in the I.R.A. and in the National Army, and up to the present, so far as temporary staffs are concerned, appointments have been practically, if not entirely, confined to National Army men. That, however, it is fully recognised, is a condition of affairs that must change; one cannot for all time regard National Army service as giving exclusive rights to temporary employment. But when suggestions are made frequently throughout the country of public appointments being made of friends of the Government and of friends of individual members of the Government, I certainly have no hesitation whatever in saying that these accusations are baseless.
We tried to get rid of the patronage element altogether. We got rid of it partly because the power of patronage with a Minister who wants to do his work in any kind of reasonable way is a hateful burden. Certainly there is nothing that gives more annoyance and more trouble to a Minister and causes him to make more enemies than to have the power of patronage. Self-defence was one of the reasons why Ministers took steps as early as possible to get rid of power in relation to appointments. Another reason was because they recognised that the best interests demanded it, that considerations of qualifications and fitness would inevitably come in, that they must come in to some extent in almost all cases, no matter what efforts were made to keep them out, and we dealt with that through provisions in the Civil Service Regulation Act which were fairly rigid. They are much more rigid than the British Order in Council, on which the Civil Service Regulation Act was based, and they have been rigidly administered. There is no comparison at all between the administration of the Civil Service Regulation Act here and the administration of the system that exists in England under the Order in Council. We have done that, not because of political pressure, not because of outside pressure, but against outside pressure. Politically it would have been a great deal easier, it would have been yielding to political pressure, if the Government did not close the door to patronage as it did.
You would find all sorts of people who, perhaps, in the abstract were in favour of competition and of impartial appointments, but who would have hopes that, if some other system existed, it might suit them, and for that reason would favour it. I certainly am aware of this, that it was no sort of reluctant yielding to outside clamour that caused us to take the line we have taken in this respect, but that on the contrary there had to be some exercise of strength of will to do exactly as we have done. This is a new country, a country full of suspicion, because it was recently an enslaved country, full of envy, jealousy and malice, and it is well, even though those lies go abroad and have no foundation, to refer to them again because credence may be given to them if there is no contradiction. I say here, as elsewhere, that we have given full consideration to the question of getting good value for public money, and of reducing expenditure as far as it can possibly be done. We have not created posts for people and have not put incompetent people into posts. As soon as we could set up other machinery we got away from the use of personal discretion or personal intervention in the filling of posts.
Since the setting up of the Free State there have been certain increases in staff. There are new duties to be performed because new departments have been set up. A department like the Department of Finance represents, very largely, a new department here. A great deal of the work that was done in the Treasury in London under the old regime has to be done here now. We have work to do in connection with the Army that was not done here under the old regime. There were a great many troops here before the Free State was set up, but the administrative work in connection with them was done in the War Office in London. That work has now to be done here. The setting up of a separate fiscal system and of a separate customs entity also led to a great increase in work. The customs staff had to be greatly increased even before the imposition of the protective duties because the customs revenue of Ireland was collected in the past in Great Britain. The goods were shipped coastwise from Great Britain here, and almost all the goods that came into the country, before the setting up of the Free State, came from Great Britain, and no customs intervention was required. Therefore, the setting up of a separate customs entity led to a great increase in the customs staff here.
The experimental protectionist policy which we have entered on has, of course, added to that considerably. Even in the matter of income tax, additional work has to be done here. Before the setting up of the Free State, the super-tax end of the work was done in London and not in Dublin, so that even where a substantial portion of the service was done here in the past all the charges in connection with it did not appear on the Irish Vote. The same thing happened in relation to the Stationery Office. The Stationery Office that was here in the past was simply a distributing branch of the London office. The Stationery Office we have discharges all sorts of duties in regard to ordering supplies, dealing with contractors, checking accounts and doing work that was not previously done here. Under the old regime, forms and printed matter were simply supplied in bulk to the Irish branch of the Stationery Office. The Exchequer and Audit Office is a new service here. The Comptroller and Auditor-General's Office, even so far as it discharged duties relating to Ireland, did not appear on the Irish Vote in the past.
A great deal of additional work has been caused by new legislation. The Land Act has caused a great increase in the staff of the Land Commission. The Department of Agriculture has had new duties thrown upon it by recent legislation. The Board of Works has had new duties thrown upon it by the Drainage Acts, both the Drainage Maintenance Act and the Arterial Drainage Act of last year. Both of these measures are already reflected in increased staffs in the Board of Works. If all those new duties are to be carried out staffs must be employed. If the Arterial Drainage Act, for which there was a clamour from all quarters in the past, is to be carried out, then a staff must be provided. In connection with that measure, as with others, the taking on of those new services has been reflected in increased cost. Temporary work of all sorts has been a very heavy burden on the administration. There was special work in regard to compensation and in regard to the Army, when it was much bigger than it is to-day. There is special work being done at present in relation to Army pensions. Nobody can simply take the figures of 1914 and the figures of the present-day cost of administration and, without looking behind the figures to see what they represent, find a comparison. Regard must be had to what is being done —to all the work that falls on the Government of the Free State that did not fall on the Irish Votes under the British system. It should also be remembered that with a Government, as with business, the smaller unit must inevitably have higher overhead charges. If it is very small like, say, the Island of Jersey, then it may be worked as a man works a shop with his own family without any charge. I believe they have unpaid police and unpaid judges in the Island of Jersey. But once it gets beyond that stage then its overhead charges will be higher than in the case of a bigger unit.
If we try to tighten up administration and reduce costs it can be done in only one way. It is done by the cooperation of the heads of various departments, and their Ministers, with the Officers of the Department of Finance, who are dealing with the matter; but it cannot be done except on a basis of good faith and with an interest in the public welfare. If you had a head of a department who did not realise his responsibilities, who was desirous of concealing waste and wanted to maintain inefficiency, there would be only one way of dealing with the situation, and that would be to remove the head of the department and replace him by somebody who had a better sense of his responsibilities. But if he was allowed to remain there, it would be impossible for the officials of the Department of Finance, just as it would be impossible for your Geddes Committee or your outside experts, to deal with the situation in that office. If a man set out to fool you, if the heads and the responsible officials in a department set out to fool anybody, they certainly could do it for a certain length of time, but they would be eventually found out and could be disposed of. But nobody who has been in touch with public officials or who knows anything at all about the situation will suggest that there is not good faith and not zeal for the public interest amongst these civil servants. I think anybody making a suggestion to the contrary simply brands himself as being a man who either is ignorant or who is unable to understand facts when he sees them and whose opinion is of no value whatever.
I do not want to harp too much on what I regard as a silly suggestion about a Geddes Committee, but as I am on that point I will mention it again. All sorts of people talk about such a committee, but they have very different views about what should be done. Some want experienced retired civil servants to come in and do the work. I do not suppose it would be in order to talk about dead-heads or anything like that, but I have every confidence that the existing civil servant will do the work better than the civil servants who have gone out on pension. You cannot get any progress in that way. As regards bringing business men in, even if it were agreed that they could not do anything, you could not get them. All of us know the difficulties of getting suitable business men for committees. Everyone knows that this would be a two or a three years' job and that business men would do it badly. Where would you get business men of the reputation and standing that would be necessary to give any weight to the final findings of such a committee who are going to spend two or three years going over the offices in the Civil Service? You simply could not get men to do that. As Deputy Egan pointed out the other day, a man may be very good and very efficient in one line of business, and yet be an absolute fool when you take him outside his own particular line. It would probably be found, I think, if you did induce some people to come in, that they would give up the job before they got very far. Even in the case of the Geddes Committee in England, there were certain things that they declined to go into. One was the matter of civil service pay. They found that the question was too complex and difficult and would require too much of their time, and in their report they specifically refused to go into the question of pay. They had conditions which do not exist here. They had a big mass of Treasury proposals for reductions and economies which they simply had to take and examine. It was because of these conditions that they were able to do work of value. There is no use in proposing certain machinery that was successful and useful in one set of circumstances to be applied to a situation where those circumstances do not exist.
In regard to a committee on policy, the Geddes Committee was practically estopped from considering policy. It was simply told that it was not to hold off from making recommendations, but that its business was not to deal with questions of policy at all. As to a Committee on policy here, that, in my opinion, would be ludicrous. It would be a confession of absolute failure and incompetence on the part of the Dáil. There may be individual matters on which it would be wise to have a Commission where you would get some sort of an expert commission and where the issues involved were complex and difficult. We had a Commission to examine the Shannon Scheme and a Commission on Banking reform. You might, perhaps, get an expert commission which would be able to give very valuable advice and assistance to the Oireachtas, but as for getting some sort of a commission of super-men who could examine everything—universal experts—the idea is ludicrous. It is the sort of idea that would be all right for somebody who has to reel off stuff that is readable. It would be all right for someone down in his constituency who wanted to play up to the crowd. I have not any objection to people reeling off these things in their speeches in the country. People making election speeches must please their audiences.
