Here is the five page executive summary of the report of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development looking at the management of the public service in Ireland.  Once you wade past the quasi-diplomacy on the first page and a half, it’s a damning indictment of how the public service has been run, albeit one buried in public management lingo.   The report is too polite to state the one huge implicit question: what was going on in government for the last 10 years?

The key conceptual device of the report is to distinguish “civil service” — the stereotypical administrative functions performed in the core government departments — from the broader “public service” — the civil service plus a panoply of state agencies and authorities with whom the members of the public usually deal when they need something done.  Bertie Ahern has expressed astonishment that there are apparently 800 of the latter agencies.  And the main theme of the report is a lack of public service integration, both between the civil service and the agencies, and among the agencies themselves.  A few phrases from the report –

segmented … sub-optimal coherence … system-wide coherence .. fragmentation and disconnects … performance measures need to look at outcomes rather than inputs or processes  … renewed emphasis on the role of ICT and e-government … few opportunities for generalist staff

Among the ironies: the country that has a global reputation for having built its boom on information technology is way behind in its own use of IT.  And many of the reforms that are called for in the report are the kind of thing that benchmarking was already supposed to have delivered.  Not showing much humility, here is what Brian Cowen had to say –

But there is a limit to the level of criticism that I will accept of the thousands of dedicated and hard working civil servants, health care workers, teachers, local authority workers, Gardaí and others who contribute to the delivery of our public services.

Note how criticism of the government’s running of the public service is converted, by Cowen, into criticism of the frontline workers — an identical tactic to that used by George Bush when his management of the Iraq war is criticised.    In addition, Cowen didn’t exactly sound raring to go –

The Review provides much food for thought for me and my colleagues. Some recommendations I can sign up to straight away; some will require further reflection; some may ultimately prove to be unsuitable to Irish circumstances. I am determined to take decisive action to improve Irish public services and look forward to working with the social partners to achieve this. I intend that when I am Taoiseach, I and my successor as Minister for Finance will set out our more detailed response to the Review.

Unfortunately, the summary of the report does not cover what could be its most concrete consequence — a negative evaluation of the “decentralisation” program, which could provide Cowen an opportunity to kill or scale back one of the worst of the McCreevy legacies. 

But what are the prospects for broader reform?  Bertie’s horror at the existence of 800 public agencies did not come with any regret at the number of appointments that they facilitated.   I remember once talking to an understandably disillusioned FG veteran who complained that the public and media didn’t understand the role that the authorities and agencies played in building the FF base: 800 agencies = thousands of appointments over the lifetime of a government = a lot of potentially influential people happy with the way things are.

So good luck to the OECD team.  Let’s hope their report doesn’t head straight to the shelf.