Vol. 245 No. 4
I move :
That a supplementary sum not exceeding £28,500 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1970, for the salaries and expenses of the Civil Service Commission and of the Local Appointments Commission.
I should like some information from the Minister at this stage. I notice that part of the sum required is to meet additional money required for the purpose of examinations. Could the Minister indicate what stage the study of the Devlin Report has reached? It appears from the Devlin Report, from some of the recommendations in it and some of the figures they have dealt with, that a stage has now been reached that in relation to applicants for the Civil Service—I refer in particular to Table 8 (2) in the Devlin Report—the most recent figures show that, of 600 applicants for posts advertised, if 56 are required, they have had to go down as far as the 600th. In other words, some 544 people offered posts in the Civil Service have turned them down. This seems to be indicative of some malaise in relation to opportunities in the service, to the increasing competition that undoubtedly arises from business opportunities. It indicates very definitely that posts in the Civil Service are increasingly less attractive to those who in the first instance applied for them, were held qualified but who, when it came to the crunch, turned them down.
There is also what I regard as a disturbing fact referred to in the Devlin Report in relation to professional posts in the Civil Service. As I read it, it indicates that some 39 per cent of these posts cannot be filled. This again seems to show a need for some urgency in dealing with the recommendations in the Devlin Report, in the reorganising and recasting of the Civil Service. I do not expect the Minister to make any major statement of policy now but I wanted to raise the matter and give it an airing at this stage. Perhaps the Minister might indicate very generally what is the present position in relation to the study of this report.
I want to talk on the same subhead but in a slightly different vein. It is most extraordinary that, as recently as in the Estimates volume produced in May last, the figure was £29,000 and it is now £43,000, but that is only a minor point.
The Irish newspapers, in imitation of their English betters, have recently started to carry great big advertisements. I do not mind admitting that I read the Irish Times and I saw this huge advertisement for administrative officers on two separate days, one day the advertisement was in English and another day it was in Irish. If the papers charge as much for printing advertisements as they do for printing political notices then each of these advertisements must have cost at least £50 and maybe even £100. What worries me about the whole thing is the question of waste. I do not know how many extra applicants one would get from an advertisement three columns wide and nine inches deep as compared with an advertisement one column wide and three inches deep. I do not think there would be one extra applicant.
With regard to the point made by Deputy O'Higgins which he learned from the Devlin Report—and ever since I heard that the Devlin Committee paid £93,000 to a group of American consultants, who could know nothing about this country, I made up my mind not to read that report—it is a good thing that 38 per cent of the professional posts in the Civil Service are vacant because that makes for a saving. I realise this is a rather old-fashioned point of view. The Department of Finance used be accused of holding up appointments in order to save money but that day has long gone and, in fact, the day has long gone when the Department of Finance could save money on anything. Judging by the numbers employed in the Civil Service, there are many people in the Civil Service who have no real work on their desks.
I consider this Supplementary Estimate to be most extraordinary. The sum required is practically double the original estimate. Of course, the Government may have taken a decision about the necessity of recruiting people for the Civil Service but there is another side to this: the Government are paying RTE for these advertisements. I do not know if the Minister has ever seen any of these advertisements. Unfortunately, in my present abode I have no option but to watch RTE, because I cannot get BBC.
The Deputy has only two prongs to his intellectual edification : the Irish Times and RTE.
It might be better than RTE and the Irish Press, or RTE as depressed by Members of the Government. I noticed that the Minister's name was mentioned once or twice in the book.
Which book?
Does the Minister not realise I am talking about the book entitled Sit Down and be Counted? Did the Minister not read it?
No.
I think we are getting away from the Supplementary Estimate.
And like the Deputy and Devlin I have no intention of reading it.
I doubt if I will finish reading the book but the Minister is mentioned in it. I think the enormous additional sum required is evidence of waste.
I should like to ask the Minister about the methodology of the appointment system used by the Civil Service and the Local Appointments Commission. I put down a question on the longest time, the shortest time and the average time of getting an appointment through the Local Appointments Commission and I very much appreciated the comprehensive answer which the Minister gave me. I did not do that to waste either the Minister's time or the time of his officials. I have frequently made clear my high regard for the whole apparatus of the Appointments Commission. The commission try very hard to maintain a high level of integrity in relation to the making of appointments in spite of what is said from time to time in this House.
I should like to know if the Minister considers the time has come when the whole process for making important appointments requires changing. Very often a person can be appointed to be in charge of an institution worth £1 million and he might very well be there for life as a result of an interview which took an hour or half an hour one afternoon. A person can put on a wonderful show at an interview and in fact not be the right person for the job. This could have serious consequences for the community because the individual might not be able to give an optimum service. I am sure the Minister is aware that in the United States and Europe attempts have been made to assess individuals in much greater depth. It takes much more time for an American company to choose personnel for posts of importance and responsibility than it does here.
I do not know very much about the Civil Service Commission but I have had some experience of the Local Appointments Commission. While I have admiration for that commission's attempts to maintain a high standard the whole apparatus is archaic and requires a complete overhaul. The longest period for making an appointment was 57 months; there were many good reasons why it took that long, but even though I am not a great admirer of private enterprise I doubt if any organisation could tolerate that kind of process in order to make an appointment. The public service has to follow procedures which private industry can ignore if it wishes to do so. The managing director can appoint his son if he wants to and nobody can question him. That cannot happen in public authority services.
I know there always must be these inhibitions on the establishment of a more efficient appointments system but I would just like to ask the Minister whether he has given the matter any thought, whether he feels there are ways in which he might make certain when he is choosing an appointee for a particular post that use is made of the resources available for personality assessment, job suitability, vocational aptitude and all these other tests which do not make the final decision but help to guide a board in making a suitable appointment in any particular case.
I remember inquiring into it when I was Minister for Health. I know most of the tediousness of the present procedure arises from an attempt to ensure that there shall be a fair appointment. I think they nearly always succeed in doing that. There are occasions when they may fail through no fault of the Appointments Commission. Not only should fair appointments be made but steps should be taken to ensure that the mechanism is brought up to date and modernised and an attempt should be made to ensure that the most suitable candidate, not just the most suitable candidate on the day, but the most suitable candidate because of his experience and qualities that are likely to last throughout the whole period of service, is appointed and that the commission are given all the help and assistance of modern psychological assessment methods now available for this purpose.
I must say that I endorse a great deal of what Deputy Dr. Browne has said about the Civil Service Commission and the Local Appointments Commission. I should like to say that both of these institutions have stood the test of time and have built up an unassailable reputation for integrity in the appointments they make. Anybody who has ever been a Minister in a particular Department, I am sure, has experienced this sort of frustrating delay in getting people appointed that Deputy Dr. Browne has been speaking of. To some extent these delays do arise from the precise reasons that Deputy Dr. Browne has mentioned, namely, the scrupulous pursuit by both commissions of fairness in making an appointment.
The world is changing very rapidly indeed. Young people today have many, many openings and opportunities available to them outside the Civil Service. The public services can no longer attract young people into their ranks to the extent that they used to be able to do by virtue of the fact that other suitable opportunities were not available. So, our recruitment techniques will definitely have to change and, as Deputy Dr. Browne said, we will have to avail of the modern techniques of personnel selection, and so on. We have that to some extent already but I think not to the extent that we should. We are experiencing and will experience to a greater degree in future considerable difficulty in getting the sort of people we want in the public service. Of course, the public service is changing in that regard also in so far as it is now looking for a whole variety of new types of people, professional people, specialists, people with technical qualifications of one sort or another and the recruitment of all of these is placing an increasing strain on the recruitment machinery.
As Deputy O'Higgins has pointed out, Devlin had quite a deal to say about the whole situation in regard to recruitment and the examination by Ministers of that particular part of Devlin is very well advanced indeed and we hope to get fairly fundamental changes effected within a reasonable time.
I do not agree at all with Deputy Dr. O'Donovan's criticism. He is accurate enough in his estimates. To some extent this increased Estimate is due to the necessity in recent times to go in for these large display type advertisements. First of all, everybody else is doing it and, if everybody else is doing it, I do not think that if we want to compete for these people —and we are competing for people now in the public service—we should just throw the thing there and say: "Come into the public service if you wish." We are going out looking for people and if private industry and private business are going in for this type of display in looking for people we have no option but to follow suit if we want to be mapped. That is one of the reasons why there is this increase in the Estimate.
The Minister would not consider a higher starting salary as being a better way?
That is not too easy either. We have an overall responsibility to keep total Government expenditure down within reasonable limits and out of that total Government expenditure we want to try to make as much money as possible available for desirable social purposes. Therefore, we have to try to be as economical as we can in the running of the public service. I think we should pay our public servants well but, on the other hand, we just cannot be over-generous in our approach.
Does the Minister think that junior civil servants starting are being paid well?
It has nothing to do with this Estimate.
I know.
The only thing I can say to the Deputy is that in our community there are lots of people who are not too well paid, not as well paid as they should be. I do not think we can blame anybody in particular for that. We are not all that wealthy a community. What we should do is to try to improve these conditions all the time. That is the test you should apply to us, not the absolute test of whether people are well paid or not.
I am thinking of people who come from the country.
These rates in the public service are negotiated through the conciliation and arbitration machinery. They are not obiter dicta on our part. They are worked out as a result of these negotiations and discussions. I think that is all by the way.
The fact remains that the Civil Service Commissioners are costing us more money here for a number of reasons and I am afraid that they will cost us a lot more money in future because, as I say, we no longer hold a monopoly position as employers or prospective employers of young people and, secondly, we will be needing in the public service a whole variety of new types of people. Therefore, we will just have to become a great deal more aggressive and active in our recruitment and, as Deputy Dr. Browne has suggested, we will have to avail of all the modern selection techniques which private industry has been using for some considerable time.
