Ex f inance chief says civil service can’t get talent over fears of public scrutiny
FORMER finance chief John Moran says the failure to hire a new secretary general in the Department of Justice shows that public scrutiny is making it difficult to attract talent to the civil service.
The 48-year-old Limerick man who took over the department in 2012 at the height of the Troika’s involvement in the country’s economy says that civil servants should not face public scrutiny for their work.
‘I was disappointed recently when I saw the difficulty that there was in hiring a secretary general for the Department of Justice. People in the public sector, people in the private sector, the media and the citizens of Ireland need to really look hard and say, “why is that the case?”’ Mr Moran told RTÉ’s The Business.
‘Unlike four or five years ago, people in those roles are now in the public eye. That demands a different set of challenges but it also requires a support system.’
Mr Moran says that the public sector can’t attract the most talented candidates because there is a fear of being ‘publicly damaged.’
‘It’s easy to slip up along the way but what we want to do is have the best civil servants we can have and have people who want to work in the civil service or in the public sector. We had moved to a system in 2011, 2010 where people were afraid to take chances because they were afraid that they would be publicly damaged.
‘It’s important to realise that you won’t necessarily get everything 100% right but that we don’t create an environment where people are afraid to try stuff.’
Mr Moran said that the fear of public scrutiny was so intense that his department didn’t want to have their Christmas party in public.
‘When I arrived at the Department of Finance the mood was such that even at the Christmas party – where they paid for it themselves – they were feeling like they could not do that in an external forum.
‘I got asked at one stage, “I hope that the tax payer is not paying for the lunch?”, and they weren’t, the people were paying for it themselves. We need to get beyond that to get the best talent in the system.’