I’m going to claim partial credit for that idea.  I can’t remember whether I actually said it to Ruairi himself, but I was punting the idea around the Labour Party backrooms for a couple of weeks before I left for Canada.  Here’s some of the flesh I put on the bones of the idea while talking to people about it.

From East Lothian Museum (licenced under Creative Commons)

Why a Minister?

So why do you need a Minister for public sector reform?  Why not a committee or a working group or even just a Junior Minister?  The reason for this is that in order for the Public Service to both respect and cooperate with the process, and for the person in question to be able to legislate (both primary & secondary) at will, a cabinet level post is required.  This also stops, or at least hinders, interference from other Ministers. 

Who that Minister should be is a different matter, but it would need to be someone with a very good idea of what they wanted, the determination (and vision) to see it through, and a strong two-way respect for/from the public service as a whole.  Preferably, it should be a TD who’s not going to run for election again – this avoids too much personal risk entering the decision-making equation.

This Department Will Self-Destruct in…

Public service reform of the type we’re envisaging here isn’t an ongoing process.  This is a once-a-generation type of change we’re looking at.  Smaller, incremental change should be ongoing, (and the bigger process must create systems that facilitate it) but this is the time – and the opportunity – for major structural change.

Because of this, it’s important to give the proposed Department of Public Service Reform a predetermined lifetime.  Five years, being the normal lifetime of a Government (all going well), would be appropriate.  It’s long enough to hopefully avoid procrastination and “waiting them out”, but short enough that there’s a visible endline at all times.

The staff (more to follow) hired for the Department should be on five year contracts or secondments.  Those not already Civil Servants should not become Civil Servants in the old sense of the term (job for life, etc), but should of course have decent terms and conditions.

Civil Servants Deciding Public Sector Reform?

As I’m sure readers are already mentally pointing out, establishing a Government Department of Public Service Reform will mean having a building full of civil servants doing the work.  The people who best understand the public sector are public servants themselves.  But they’re also an interested party – some interested in strong reform, others interested in the status quo.  Group theory would suggest that in large numbers they’ll tend towards the latter.

So yes, you need civil servants working in this hypothetical Department.  But you also need to bring in people from the wider public service and from the non-public sector.  I’d say that your ideal mix would have the analysis/decision-making units of the Department made up of civil servants, other public servants and non-public sector people (be they from academia, private sector, NGOs or elsewhere).  It would also include people from each of those sectors (civil/public/non) from other countries.  The US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand should be considered just as much as European nations.

The civil servants assigned to this Department should be hand selected from the best and brightest in the rest of the public sector.  They should be recruited by the new Department, not sent to it because they’re an inconvenience or of no use to their previous Department (as is alleged to so often happen in the Irish public service).

A mix like this would, hopefully, allow for some creative thinking while taking into account how the public service actually works in practice.

Bringing it all together

With a good Minister and the active cooperation of other Government Ministers, such a Department could be making a real difference in a realatively short time.  Its remit should be broad enough to allow for service improvements, quality control improvements and cost-beneficial additions as well as cost cutting.

But, I hear you cry, the Unions would never allow it.  Not right now they wouldn’t.  And that’s why one or more parties needs to run into the next General Election with a policy like this (in about as much detail as I’ve given) clearly laid out.

While the Unions might complain about such proposals, and some of the consequential reforms, being brought in off the cuff, it’s a different ball game altogether when there’s a clear mandate in place from the people.  One might take one’s chances on industrial action when there’s no clear mandate.  But if the people have spoken clearly, they’re not going to take withdrawl of any services well.

So, what we need is:

• A Minister for Public Service Reform
• A Department that only lasts 5 years
• Lots of non-civil servants staffing that Department
• Wide-ranging powers and terms of reference
• An election

Shouldn’t be a problem, then.

Took a bit longer to get back to blogging than expected, due to a bug in the upgrade of WordPress, but all sorted now.

Childers Election Poster

A few online things to note from the campaign – Liveblogs and Twitter really came to life during the counts & results phase.  IrishElection.com did brilliantly at that stage.  The weakness of these media is still there, though: there’s no way of knowing what the reliability of the source is.  In the noise, there are great, solid sources (like your correspondant), and sources that are full of shite (like the Libertas spinners).  However, that applied equally to RTÉ, who occasionally got their announcements wrong.

Blogs, Facebook and YouTube didn’t have much effect on the campaign.  Having talked to a few internet-enabled politicos who were managing candidate websites, the traffic levels on election day and the few days before were higher than normal, but still in the low hundreds region at the highest.

I’m off to Canada in a month’s time (via DC), where the possibility of an election can’t be discounted.  July 27th is the date they’re theorising about, which would give me a good week of campaigning!

On another note, check out my little brother’s blog – he’s travelling around Asia on the way to Australia, and has just completed a 21-day trek in the Himalayas.

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

No, it’s not Marx, it’s the Father of Capitalism, Adam Smith, in ‘The Wealth of Nations‘. It’s here in context (para I.10.82).

Blogging is going to be very infrequent for the next month due to the European Elections!

First up, the results of a new poll (English translation) undertaken in Poland on the European Elections campaign.  This was carried out by the local branch of TNS/MRBI (TNS/OBOP in Poland), so we can expect it to be fairly reliable.  960 people surveyed at the start of April across Poland.

The result: Libertas failed to get even a single person to “vote” for them in the poll.  Not one.  Not only did they register 0%, they failed to even get 0.1% of those polled to express a preference for them.

What to do?

So, what does Declan Ganley decide to do?  Well, according to English-language Polish news site TheNews.pl, he’s going to find a way around the funding rules.

Though European election law insists that campaign funds must come from within the relevant nations, Ganley will secure loans taken out in Poland, so finding a way around the rule, it was revealed late last month. Libertas Polska will then default on the loans, forcing banks to seek recompense from Ganley himself.

They’re not quoting some Euro-federalist opponent of Libertas in that story, they’re quoting Artur Zawisza, who they say is the Vice President of Libertas Poland, and who Wikipedia says is the President of the Polish-Irish Interparliamentary Group.

Is this how Declan Ganley financed Libertas in Ireland during the Lisbon Treaty referendum?  The Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) is still unsatisfied with the answers he gave about that funding.  Perhaps someone has unwittingly unearthed the loophole he’s stuffing millions of euro through.