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Thursday 4th December 2003     Check Against Delivery    

Speech by John Bruton TD on Budget 2004 and Decentralisation in the Dáil Chamber Thursday 4TH December 2003 at 3.00pm

I want to express some personal concerns about one matter I regard as of paramount importance – the effect of the budget on the efficiency of the Irish civil service. I speak as somebody who has enormous admiration for the Irish civil service, and who regards the Irish Civil Service as one of the great achievements of the Irish State.

Kevin O’Higgins and others who insisted, through the establishment of the Civil Service Commission, on the non-political character of the civil service did incalculable good for this country.

I speak also as a member of the Government which introduced the Top Level Appointment Commission (T.L.A.C.), the purpose of which was to ensure mobility within the civil service and to end the confinement of talent within individual departments. The Irish civil service has thus had an essential unity, a unity that has underpinned the unity of the State itself.

I have personal worries, which I hope I can explain in this speech, on the effect which the budget will have on this great Irish institution. I raise these concerns as queries.  I hope they will be satisfactorily answered.
It is wrong to describe the move of 10,000 civil servants out of Dublin as decentralization. It is recentralisation of parts of the civil service to a series of different places.

Let me stress that I strongly favour a policy of genuine decentralization.

A genuine policy of decentralization would involve devolving decision-making to regional offices of every department in every region. So, instead of housing policy being made for all of Ireland in Dublin or in Wexford, it would be being made in six or seven different locations, one in each region for each region, by regionalized offices that had discretion, within an overall policy envelope set nationally.

But this sort of genuine decentralization is exactly the policy that this government is now attempting to reverse with in the Health service.  In the Health service we have had genuine decentralization, through its health boards, who have been making decisions in the regions, accessible to the citizens of those regions. This Government now proposes to do away with decentralized Health Boards, and to centralize health policy in a single national board.

This Government’s policy is not one of decentralization, but of recentralisation. My criticism of some parts of the Government’s proposal is they subordinate the effectiveness of senior decision-making in the civil service to other purposes.

At the end of the day the primary purpose of the civil service should be to make wise decisions, and to implement them efficiently.

I agree that there is great scope to move those who are involved in the implementation of policy out of Dublin. Implementation of policy is a mechanical process, and, using modern communications, it can be done from almost anywhere. Therefore it makes excellent sense to do it from lower cost locations than Dublin.  On that basis there is room for moving considerable numbers of public servants out of Dublin. On the Minister’s list, probably 5000 of the recentralised jobs are involved in implementation of policy, and there is no problem at all with moving those 5000 jobs to regional centres. It makes good sense for all sorts of reasons.
On the other hand, the making of wise policy at national level is something that requires constant and easy contact between senior decision-makers, across departmental boundaries. The making of wise policy also requires that senior civil service decision-makers be easily accessible to members of the public  and to organizations who wish to make representations to them. On that basis, I am afraid I have to question the decision to recentralise in multiple locations the policy-making outside the capital functions  of certain civil service and state bodies. 

What is a capital city ? Why do all countries have capital cities at all ?

Capital cities exist, in most democracies, to make policy at national level. This is done in one place because there are inherent economies of scale to making national policy in one place.

Capital cities do not have to be the biggest city in a country. There is a very good case for having a western city, as the capital of Ireland, but I have to question the budget’s attempt to dissolve the notion of a capital city altogether by dissipating the nation’s policy formation function over a dispersed geographic area. I would be interested to know of any examples from other countries of policy-making, as distinct from policy implementation, being subdivided geographically in the way the budget proposes for Ireland.

Let me illustrate my questions.

At the moment, if there is to be co-ordination of sports policy with rural development policy, the senior decision-makers involved are located in one city and can meet readily with one another, at a moments notice. In future the senior decision-makers on sports policy will be in Killarney, and the senior decision makers on rural development policy will be in Knock. If they are to meet, they will have to spend large amounts of a working day travelling from one centre to another centre.  Spontaneous meetings, organized at short notice, will be completely impossible.

Let me give another example.

Let us suppose that the Cavan County Manager wants to meet senior decision makers in the Department of the Environment to discuss housing policy in Cavan. At the moment, he can do so by travelling to the Custom House. In future he will have to drive around Dublin, and all the way down to Wexford to meet a senior official that he needs to meet in the Department of the Environment. Conversely if the Wexford County Manager wants to meet senior officials in the Department of Communications about broadband roll out in Wexford, he will have to drive all the way form Wexford to Dublin,  and then on to Cavan, and back again. Not very efficient.

At least these County Managers will get travelling expenses. What about a voluntary tourist association in Donegal that will have to travel all the way to Killarney to see the Department of Tourism.  They will have to overnight whereas they can do all their business in one day under present arrangements, and if they use public transport they will probably have to come via Dublin anyway.

If the Minister for Justice, whose Headquarters is in Dublin, is to meet the Garda Commissioner, one or other of them is going to have to make the journey from the Department of Justice Headquarters in Dublin, to the Garda Headquarters in Thurles, or vice versa.

Furthermore, if a senior official in the Department of Justice wants to have a three-cornered meeting with the Gardai and the Prison Service, the meeting will have to take place somewhere between Longford, Thurles and Dublin.  

It will be even more difficult for inter-Departmental committees to function. There are probably 300 or more inter-departmental committees or Boards on which civil servants are representing their Minister.  The functioning of these inter-departmental committees will be made much more difficult by virtue of the fact that the civil servants involved will be in future coming to meetings from the four corners of Ireland, rather than from areas in close proximity to one another. The allocation for travelling expenses in the public service will have to be substantially increased to take account of the fact that the journey to meetings by senior decision-makers, which now can be accomplished after a ten minute walk, will in future only be accomplished after a three hour car or rail journey.

Has the Minister done an estimate of the additional cost of running committees and boards like this, from the point of view of travelling expenses, overnight expenses, and the loss of executive time through travel as a result of his proposals?

I know that it will be said that it will be possible to do business by means of telephone, by fax, by e-mail, and even by tele-conferences. This is true, up to a point, but most modern businesses will say that there is no substitute for direct face to face human contact between senior decision-makers in the business.  The Headquarters civil servants from Killarney, from Cavan, from Shannon, from Birr, from Wexford, and from Limerick will be in Dublin so much to appear before Dail Committees, to brief their Minister for Dail appearances, to take part in inter-Departmental Committees, and to meet delegations that are unable to travel to their new Headquarters, that they will have to be given a large special allowance to maintain a second home in Dublin, in addition to their home in the town of the new Headquarters of their Department.

One of the most consistent and serious criticisms of the civil service in Ireland has been the existence of “Departmentalitis”.

“Departmentalitis” means the pursuit of narrow departmental objectives, rather than the overall objectives of Government policy. One of the aims of T.L.A.C., was to reduce “Departmentalitis” by allowing civil servants to move on promotion from one department to another. The more that individual departments are physically removed from one another, and the less formally and informally their staff are in contact with one another on a daily basis, the more severe will be the recurrence of the disease of “Departmentalitis”.

We have been told that, for an individual civil servant, moving to one of the new Headquarters outside Dublin will be “voluntary”. We should not forget that, for most people, a move to headquarters will be a promotion.

Thus, although declining the move to headquarters may be a voluntary choice to make, it will involve declining promotion and thus will involve damage to one’s career.

In many cases this will then mean that the best people will not seek promotion, because promotion will involve disruption of the lives of their families, especially when one bears in mind that the spouses of most senior civil servants have their own jobs.