Civil servants face discrimination in senior post quotas

THE UNION representing higher civil servants is to oppose Government plans to reserve a quota of promotional positions at senior level for external candidates.

The general secretary of the Association of Higher Civil Servants Dave Thomas told the union’s annual conference in Dublin yesterday that it could not accept a situation whereby serving civil servants were debarred from applying for these positions.

“To do so is to actively discriminate against ambitious and hardworking public servants who do vital work on behalf of the State.”

In its programme for government, the Fine Gael/Labour administration gave a commitment that all appointments at principal officer level and above would be open to external competition and that at least one-third of such appointments would be reserved for candidates outside of traditional Civil Service structures for a period of five years.

The conference passed a motion instructing the union’s incoming executive to oppose the Government’s plan.

Separately, the chairman of the national body charged with implementing the Croke Park agreement, PJ Fitzpatrick, told the conference that claims put forward by Government departments for the level of savings generated under the deal were to be independently verified.

The implementation body is about to carry out the first review of the agreement on public service pay and reform which was ratified by trade unions last summer.

Mr Fitzpatrick said it was very important in respect of public confidence in the agreement that the figures for savings were independently audited and certified.

Mr Fitzpatrick said that since the end of 2008 – shortly before the current moratorium on recruitment in the public service was put in place – about 16,000 staff had departed.

He said that under the programme for government this trend would accelerate and by 2015 there could be about 40,000 fewer staff in the public service.

Mr Fitzpatrick said he did not know whether staff reduction targets could be met solely through natural wastage.

The chairman of the Association for Higher Civil Servants, Peadar Carpenter, said that while the union had signed up to change under the Croke Park deal this did not mean “that we buy in to all the homespun half truths that are currently doing the rounds”.

“There is a certain amount of extra efficiencies that can be achieved in almost any institution but the idea currently doing the rounds that you can do huge amounts of extra work with less resources is just not credible. The simple fact of the matter is that to achieve the savings required some areas will have to be wound down.”

He said the proposed increase in demands for more reporting to the Oireachtas would require either additional resources or other work would have to be stopped.

Meanwhile, the Government announced yesterday that the numbers employed in the public service fell by about 2,000 to 303,457 in the first quarter of the year. The Minister for Public Service Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin said the Government was on track to meet its targets for reducing employment numbers and its pay bill this year.