In Reply to: re: work to rule posted by Tech on February 18, 2010 at 12:22:01:

Actually I go commando myself and can see perfectly well thank you - but thank you for the needless insult too while we're at it.

I'm not talking about off-the-shelf products - you will find that the public service is quite good at negotiating deals for standard products - that's just shopping. I am talking about outsourcing huge areas of normal day-to-day work that should be done by public servants but is put out to the private sector at vastly inflated rates. The 1000 euro a day boys and gals who have the ear of the politicos are making a killing - the original rip-off Ireland brigade but pretty poor at their job in general.

You will find standard time-keeping, accounting packages, databases, hr packages all over the public service but even there the external maintenance costs for what 'can be easily tailored to requirements' could be done in-house at much cheaper costs - if the staff were there.

When you take the total cost of ownership there are huge inefficiencies and additional expense forced on the taxpayer by this private is better mantra/ideology.

Our public sector is much smaller and more poorly supported than in the majority of other OECD countries - even at the height of the boom. A few stats to illustrate how poorly we support our public service:

Ireland's spend on education in 2006 was a mere $10,468 per 3rd level student - a little ahead of Brazil at $9,994 per student but way below the average OECD and less than half the USA spend. Then overall levels of education spend are worse even - we were third from the bottom, just slightly ahead of the Slovak Republic and Greece.

Ireland's spend on health in 2006 put us 7th from the OECD bottom rankers – Korea, Mexico, Estonia, Poland, Slovak Republic and Greece were lower spenders than us.

Our social expenditure was pretty poor too as was our score on income poverty – close to the top at 11.5% of working age people.

The only thing we scored relatively highly on was the % of national income spent on overseas aid where we were 6th from the top in 2006.

Our R&D spend was about half the OECD average. The Irish percentage of workers in ICT was 3rd from the bottom only beaten by Turkey and Greece on this one.

My point is that we have a very poorly funded public service in comparison with other developed countries. Cutting it back severely as we are now doing will push us further down those OECD leagues - which of themselves are not important but the on-the-ground consequences will be felt.