A civil servants' union leader has sharply criticised the way the Minister for Education used officials to prepare an information pack for Fianna Fáil local election candidates.
"It is an invidious abuse of civil servants to use us almost as party apparatchiks to further a political campaign, either on behalf of himself or his party. It just isn't on," said Ms Rhona McSweeney of the Public Service Executive Union.
Ms McSweeney, a higher executive officer in Mr Dempsey's Department, said every Government minister employed civil servants in their constituency offices and unions had no difficulty with that.
But civil servants operated under a code of conduct which prohibited them from being involved in political matters related to their work. There was a loss of civil liberties involved for departmental staff, but they recognised that it was in the interests of the State to have an apolitical civil service.
By acting as he did, she claimed, Mr Dempsey had abused the role of civil servants. "We have gone to great extremes. We have made sacrifices to remain apolitical and to be now, as I have said, invidiously abused by being drawn into a political process, we are not happy with it."
Regardless of the amount of work involved, Mr Dempsey had used civil servants from the Department of Education to create "political propaganda". She was not reassured by Mr Dempsey's insistence that the information compiled was available "at the push of a button", she said, as collating it had still taken civil servants' time.
"There might have been the odd incident in the past, particularly at general election time, when information might have been provided, but to provide party propaganda to a particular group of politicians, or aspiring politicians, that is something new," said Ms McSweeney, who yesterday completed her two-year term as PSEU president.
