Language 'toned down' after draft shown to civil servants
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IT was the biggest review of the Irish public service in the history of the State, and was supposed to be couched in hard-hitting terms -- but then it was shown in advance to the very people it was supposed to be reforming.
The OECD team carried out more than 100 interviews with some of the most senior officials in the country, ranging from then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to politicians, gardai, county managers, business people and hospital managers.
But at a private meeting in Dublin on December 7 last, some of the country's most senior civil servants were shown a copy, along with representatives from other countries.
OECD review co-ordinator Edwin Lau admitted some of the more "hard-hitting" language in the report, which was paid for by the Irish Government, had been "toned down" as a result of the interventions of the civil servants.
"It's not so much an effort on the part of the Irish senior civil servants to cover things up, but when you get a bunch of bureaucrats in the room, that's the language which comes out at the end," he said.
He added: "We make a statement and they come back with 10 exceptions where 'that wasn't true' and then you have to tone it down a bit."
The civil servants present were the members of the Irish Liaison Group -- secretary generals from the Departments of the Taoiseach, Finance (two), Education, Health, Environ-ment, Social and Family Affairs and Justice. Also present at the "peer review" meeting in Dublin on December 7 last were representatives from Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden.
According to Mr Lau, the senior civil servants on the Irish Liaison Group" also pointed out that several Cabinet ministers had not yet been interviewed and should be consulted before the report was published.
The report was due to be made public last December, but the extra interviews with around half-a-dozen Cabinet ministers took three more months and the report was not published by Mr Ahern, in one of his final acts as Taoiseach, until last April.
Despite this delay, Mr Lau maintains the OECD report's conclusions were not altered by the civil servants' interventions.
Appropriate
"There were some cases where there were discussions about what was the appropriate language. But in none of those cases did we get rid of factual statements or even judgments," he said.
But he conceded the OECD often used bureaucratic language in the report and would "try to do a better job in the future".
The group of senior civil servants who had contacted the OECD anonymously expressed frustration when the final report came out. "We thought this was going to be the fundamental root-and-branch review we had been hoping for the last 30 years. But there was nothing in it," one official said.
"It was a rough draft. So we had to do quite a bit of drafting ourselves. It went to an editor, so it all took some time. The text was pretty much finalised by the second half of March and the production took some time as well," he said.
- Michael Brennan Political Correspondent
