In Reply to: re: work to rule posted by Trenchrat on February 18, 2010 at 00:11:04:

As I say your innocence is sweet. But it is the politicos, who think that private is always better than public, who sign the cheques and forced the outsourcing mantra on the public service. Instead of employing people who can do the job on site they pay out 1000 euros a day for what more often than not turns out to be a loada rubbish. And then they want another 1000-euro-a-day contract to fix their mess!

I've recently had experience of being in the room with a number of highly paid IBM 'executives'. To say that they were clueless is putting it kindly. And over the years I have had the same experience with plenty more 'consultants' and have had to 'clean up' after them when the work they did proved to be useless and basically had to be redone - of course causing massive delays. I would love to have simply been able to have a small in-house team to cover the kind of stuff we are now routinely forced to 'outsource'.

But our political masters do not permit that kind of thing - private sector is always better is the mantra - and cases like ppars are just the tip of iceberg as a result.

There are plenty of halifaxes and greedy but rubbish private sector bankers out there who plunged the country into the current crisis. But for some reason it is the public sector who seems to be now to blame for our dire financial straits. It ain't.

But things are going to get a lot tougher and the public sector won't be lacking in trying to cope. But you can't seriously expect that services will improve when the staff numbers they had (which were woefully inadequate and much lower than in the majority of OECD countries even at the height of the so-called 'boom') have already been slashed with more to come. Wait until the end of the year and the money for roads has run out because of the damage done during the hard frost in Dec/Jan. Wait until all the resource teachers are let go.

Remember rip-off Ireland? That was predominantly the public being ripped off by the private sector fat cats.

I'm not saying that everyone in the public service is as sharp as knife but at least they don't charge out at a grand per day and they get the job done with the resources provided. The trouble is consultants speak the same kind of lingo gibberish as do our politicians - they mirror the kind of rubbish we hear from our political masters. And they are good at pocketing the taxpayers’ cash too just as the politicos are. Like promotes like.