Elaine Loughlin: What is costing our civil service so much?
Are we creating a civil service that gets paid more, works fewer hours, and outsources an increasing amount of the job?
Mary Lou McDonald recently sparked a backlash from some within Government when she suggested that our public and civil service was “constipated”. However, even her detractors would agree that there is room for further reform.
It’s a system that spent more than €30m farming out work to private consultants, legal teams, HR experts, and accountants in the past 12 months alone. It’s a culture that is “not easily challenged or changed”, according to finance committee chairman John McGuinness.
Writing in this paper last week, the Fine Gael TD claimed an administrative structure had been quietly created, which he described as “a nightmare of quangos, subsidiary public service organisations, satellite companies and organisations, and committees of one sort or another. It’s almost impossible for politicians, the public, or the media to get to the bottom of many of the scandals that are now finding their way into the light.”
In recent weeks, the €81,000 pay increase taken by Department of Health secretary general Robert Watt has cast a spotlight on the salaries earned by our top civil servants. Of course, Mr Watt, who takes home €294,920 a year, is an outlier, earning significantly more than even his counterparts in other departments. However, civil and public servants across all grades have seen their pay increase due to the Building Momentum agreement.
The Cabinet is also expected to agree to a recommendation that working hours for civil servants be restored to pre-Haddington Road levels from July, as outlined in Mulvey report.
At the same time, millions of euro in taxpayers’ money continues to be spent lining the pockets of top private legal firms, well-known consultancy practices, PR companies and advisory bodies. Companies such as Mazars, Ernst & Young, and KPMG all feature on the long list of work that was outsourced from Government departments at a cost of €31m last year.
This bill does not include the departments of education or higher education, as both have yet to count and publish their 2021 consultancy spend.
Almost half of the total figure was spent by the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications, which racked up a €14.3m bill.
The Department of Agriculture forked out more than €4.4m on external consultants, the Department of Children spent €5.3m on private firms, while the outside consulting provided to the Department of Housing came to €1.8m.
Although the Chief State Solicitor’s Office provides litigation, advisory, and conveyancing services to government departments, more than €1.49m was spent hiring some of the country’s top legal firms, including William Fry, Matheson, and Arthur Cox.
Former public expenditure and reform minister Brendan Howlin says the system of using external advisers in many ways suits top civil servants, as it provides departments with cover:
Looking at the use of outside human resources consultants, which included €37,234 of spending by the Department of Transport, Mr Howlin said HR positions are among a number of areas that have become “promotion posts”.
“So people became the HR manager without any specific training. The whole reform agenda was to build up specialty, so you will have financial management or trained financial managers, you will have human resource managers who are trained and specific human resource managers across the public service. They should not be dependent on external advisers for that,” he said.
Former communications minister Denis Naughten also believes government departments have become far too reliant on outside advisers.
“Every time a complex decision has to be made in government or by a government department, a team of consultants are hauled in, who are accountable to nobody.”
While he said external consultation is important, it must complement expertise within government, not replace it. He warned that external consultants can sometimes provide departments with the advice they think their paymasters want to hear.
He has also suggested that, instead of getting a private consultancy firm to act as a “middle man”, department staff should be able to go directly to experts and academics for advice.
"We end up paying consultants who go and glean the information off the experts, the academics, and then present in a particular format to a government department,” Mr Naughten said.
“What we should be doing far more is going directly to the academics, asking them to provide us with advice because the advice that they will provide us is untainted. Ethically, they have to give us untainted advice, so at least you have the factual information to then make the decision one way or the other, rather than relying on the consultants.”
Of course, some level of outside consultancy will always be required, as many departments rightly stressed when providing their spending details.
Mr Naughten pointed out that, when he was a minister: “I had two and a half staff working on EU energy legislation: In the UK at the time, they had over 200 staff working on that area. So that’s why we are so reliant on external advice.”
Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has as much as admitted that a further pay increase for our civil and public servants will be on the cards when unions and Government officials next gather to thrash out a deal.
“It’s absolutely the case that, if the Government were to agree to any further pay increases this year, that we would be looking for something in return, particularly around productivity,” Mr Varadkar added.
The volume and type of work that is pushed off the tables of department staff and into the private sector should be examined as part of any new deal.
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A statue of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, has stood on the grounds of Leinster House since 1923.
The statue was sculpted by John Henry Foley, who created the Daniel O’Connell statue on Dublin’s O’Connell St, as well as the statue of Fr Mathew on St Patrick’s Street in Cork.
In 2018, calls to have it removed were rejected. The Oireachtas petitions committee said at the time that a petition seeking its removal by a member of the public was inadmissible, and that the statue would remain.
February 3: With the help of Harry Boland and Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera managed to escape from Lincoln Jail in England. Part of the plot involved him dressing as a woman.
February 2: The British embassy in Dublin was destroyed by a crowd of demonstrators protesting over the shooting deaths of 13 people in Derry, during what would become known as Bloody Sunday.
February 4: In the wake of a High Court decision, then social welfare minister Proinsias De Rossa promised that 70,000 married women entitled to equality arrears would be paid at a cost of £240m to the State. Then Democratic Left TD Kathleen Lynch described the court ruling as a “marvellous and hard-won victory” for the thousands of married women who had in the past been “diddled” by successive governments.
February 3: Under the headline ‘Cowen’s fightback’ it was reported that then taoiseach Brian Cowen had launched a calculated political attack by facing down the country’s trade unions and imposing a €2bn package of spending cuts despite their opposition. The hardline stance came despite the threat of industrial action from union members opposed to the key element of the package — a pension levy on 270,000 public servants.