There's a very good piece by Noel Whelan in today's Irish Examiner asking precisely that. He says that if the key political issues are to be about competence rather than ideology or policy, then why should politicians alone shoulder all the blame for bad cost miscalculations and overspends?
Over the last 15 years a series of benchmarking-style deals for senior civil servants have dramatically increased their pay scales and pension entitlements. Their remuneration is now comparable to some of the top jobs in the private sector. As a result we are entitled to expect private sectors levels of accountability from our top civil service managers.
This sort of argument is familiar enough. More significantly, Whelan points to significant institutional reforms in recent years that were designed to foster a new style of public management.
A wide range of significant changes in the management and accountability structures within the civil service were introduced under the general umbrella of the strategic management initiative in the mid and late 1990s. Much of this was designed under the last Rainbow government and implemented under the current administration. Effect has been given to these changes by a combination of legislation including the Public Service Management Act, 1997, new powers given to Dáil committees to compel civil servants to attend and the Freedom of Information Act (although the latter has since be curtailed somewhat.)
The Public Service Management Act represented the most fundamental statutory change in the organisation of the business of the public service since the original Ministers and Secretaries Act of 1924. The role of the ministers as being in charge of departments and responsible to Dáil Éireann set out in the constitution was left in place, but the Act did bring about significant changes in the accountability and responsibility structures for senior civil servants.
The key point is about accountability. We can no longer pretend that ministers, collectively or individually, formulate policy and that what civil servants do is merely to put this into effect. It is pointless to maintain essentially fictitious distinctions between politics and administration. But politicians are elected and civil servants are appointed and nobody wants to give politicians further opportunities for buck-passing. But under the various reforms broadly adopted under the rubric of new public management, civil servants are increasingly assigned significant areas of responsibility that have considerable impact in terms of both policy outcomes and the public finances.
Such developments are generally to be welcomed but it takes a long time for the culture of an entity like the civil service to change. It's not just a question of an inherent conservatism in a body of people that places much store on precedent and "knowledge of the files". There is always the danger that, far from thinking about creating public value, civil servants might adopt an even more risk-averse approach to their tasks if accountability is understood as facing the full rigours of public and media scrutiny.
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