Public services ‘compromised’ by work from home model
SOME public services are being ‘compromised’ by staff working from home, Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe has been warned.
The public sector now operates a ‘blended’ model whereby people can work from home for a certain number of days per week.
Responding to Rose Conway Walsh, Sinn Féin’s public expenditure spokeswoman about how it was working, Mr Donohoe, said: ‘My officials are engaging with government departments to form a view on what impact it is having on the delivery of some of the targets of government departments.
‘I’m hearing mixed views, for example, from the Oireachtas, and Oireachtas colleagues and engagement in my own constituency. I think there are some government departments, I’m not going to name who they are...
‘A number of State bodies that have managed to change seamlessly. And they tend to be organisations that were a lot further down the road in the rollout of the digital approach to how they do the work.
‘But I am getting feedback from members of the Oireachtas, that there are some public services at the moment that deputies and senators feel are being compromised. So that work is under way.’
The blended policy was launched in 2022, with a review set to be conducted this year on its workings. It is due to be completed by the end of the first half of this year to ‘quantify’ where ‘performance stands’.
‘We also have to be conscious of the importance of these policies, from an employer competitiveness point of view. Maybe this will change in the time ahead. But over the last two years, we have been in a very, very, very hot labour market’ Mr Donohoe said.
‘And certainly from the point of view of the retention of staff and the recruitment of newer civil servants we have needed to have a blended approach and a blended offering in terms of where work is done.’
During the pandemic Marc MacSharry, an independent TD, claimed that public secmoment, tor workers were not working properly as they were working from home.
He told the Dáil at the time that some civil servants were using lockdown to ‘lie down on the couch and watch box sets’.
Mr Donohoe also defended the public service from insinuations that it was not efficient enough or had enough accountability from Peadar Tóibín, the leader of Aontú.
Mr Donohoe said: ‘You are perpetuating the idea there in your question and the way you put it to me, of a perpetually inefficient public service. I fundamentally disagree with you.
‘For example, the projects that are happening at higher universities in places of third level learning all over the country, and the speed with which those projects are happening, they match what the private sector can do.
‘I look at what our semistate sector is doing at the organisations like ESB and Bord na Móna, they are very much a match at anything the private sector is doing.’
Minister Ossian Smyth, who has responsibility for procurement, also confirmed that where a project had gone through the procurement process and a tender process where a contract was awarded, but the successful bidder then withdrew, that a new tender process had to begin again.
Mr Donohoe accepted this was ‘frustrating’ to communities, when they saw that projects designed to help them were delayed because of environmental objections.
But he added: ‘You’ll be aware of the environmental legislation that you know, groups and stakeholders in our country believe to be really important to them. And it is from their point of view, that in turn has led to delay of projects that the government and local communities want us to deliver.’ He said that if they tried to stop this, they would be ‘accused’ of trying to stop people being able to give their own view.
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They match the private sector