Public service reform in Ireland has long been the victim of political leaders failing to confront the need to change how we organise ourselves. All too often this thorny issue has been left to individual civil and public servants, many of whom have found the frustration of trying to get ministers, and others, to focus on the need for change overwhelming. Nonetheless, there are many examples throughout the public service of innovation and demonstrations of a willingness on the part of staff to do things differently. In fact one of the more notable features of the Irish Public Service, a point highlighted in the OECD Review of the Public Service, is the extent to which flexible decision-making has contributed to the betterment of services to citizens and communities across the State. The regret, as acknowledged in the Report, has been the lack of strategic leadership provided to public servants.
So it is refreshing to see that Ministers in the new Government do seem committed to delivering on their obligations, as set out in the Programme for Government. Notably in that regard is the willingness of the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government to move on implementation of the Efficiency Review. There maybe several elements in the Review which legitimately can and should be queried, for example the move to larger/joint local authority arrangements. But at least there is now some sense of direction being given to the system, something which was lacking over several ministerial careers in the past decade or more.
It is also worth acknowledging that the Minister has taken the political hot potato of Limerick in hand and is moving quickly to bring about a very substantial re-configuration of local government services in Limerick. This is something that most will have argued in favour of for many years. While some will continue, with reason, to argue that it would have been better to expand the city council area, the fact that there is at last movement towards the reform of what was a wholly unsatisfactory situation is to be welcomed. More interestingly the Minister, with the establishment of an Implementation Group (including Denis Brosnan, Chairman of the Mid West Task Force, Dr. Vincent Cunnane, Chief Executive Officer of Shannon Development and Chair of the Limerick Joint Economic Committee along with the two local authority Managers and supported by a former county manager) suggests that he recognises the central role the new Limerick Council will have for all public services in the Mid West Region. Furthermore, from the Group’s terms of reference, there is recognition that the best way forward is to allow the group to come up with what is best for Limerick – not what central government might wish to put in place. Thus there should be the flexibility to think in terms of the metropolitan area and its role in the Region along with the need to ensure that rural Limerick continues to achieve economic and social development.
So what about Tipperary? One of the enduring mysteries of the local government system in Ireland was the existence of the two Tipperarys. They were set up originally to allow for a more focused effort by the British to control the local population, and, despite what Kilkenny people might think, this is something not obviously necessary in the 21st century. The Minister has taken the decision to move on bringing the two halves together.
At face value this might seem like an appropriate thing to do but it does come with several challenges, not least of which is where the capital will be!! More importantly will be the need to address the regional planning impact. Clearly there is a relevance to having the existing North in the Mid-West Region but what of the South? Do we continue therefore with the existing regional authority structures and boundaries? Equally there will be implications for other public bodies and how they are organised, for example Shannon Development.
One of the key challenges for both Limerick and Tipperary is to come up with the structures which will work best for them as unified bodies. The Minister in his policy statement in July seems to reflect this thinking. There is likely to be a need for some consideration of greater, area based, service delivery. The advent of motorways and better transport links might mean that Tipperary and Limerick are not such a long way away but there is still a need to recognise that some services are best done at a local or sub-county level. Those charged with moving forward with the unification processes in both Limerick and Tipperary will no doubt already have an appreciation of this. The immediate move, therefore, by the Minister in both instances should provide both local and national government with a really useful set of templates on which to base reform of local government generally across the State. More interestingly, both could provide the scope to examine the alignment of local development, county and city enterprise boards and other features of local public administration within a renewed local authority framework, a key objective of the Programme for Government.
Too good an opportunity to miss, the reform of local government in both Limerick and Tipperary really could provide the country with a valuable way forward for public service reform generally, not to mention the capacity to elicit real savings in public expenditure across the national silos of government. These silos are a constant bugbear for many in local government and local development. A real effort on the part of national government to confront such silos in parallel to the reforms proposed by the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government would go some way to moving the overall system of public management towards a more organised and integrated framework, something which has been all too absent in the past decade.
