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.