A Civil Servant In Ireland Is No Longer Civil Or A Servant.
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012My darling wife of almost 40 years and myself have been enjoying full time life in Ireland, this land we considered our spiritual home, for the last seven years and before that part time for yonks, going back into the 1960s. In all that time nothing really has changed, some people got a little uppity when money was flowing like the Niagara Falls in full spate, during the era known as the Celtic Tiger years, but all in all those years of excess passed our little town of Boyle by. A few profited and lost but most carried on struggling as they have always done. There was a lot of losers, in the main young married couples who were forced to pay hyper-inflated house prices and are now in hyper-negative equity, to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand euro, which they will spend the rest of their lives recovering from, if indeed they ever do. I said nothing has changed, but for a few greedy bastards in Dublin who forced the situation in the good days, although they have had some come-uppance, are still left with a nice little pile under the mattress. This cabal of high ranking politicians, civil servants and bankers have been screwing this state since DeValera learnt to write his signature on Government documents and they are the only winners and always will be if we kowtow.
I have no real complaints, if we take the above mentioned filth out of the equation but I was also caught up in this octopus like struggle against ever diminishing financial returns and I know how soul destroying it can be. However the people are lovely and the countryside is beautiful and I am glad we made the move.
Unfortunately there is one thing I have noticed and which I was not aware of when living in England and that might be because as we get older we have more need to contact government and public sector departments. My wife certainly has because she decided, shortly after coming here, to devote her life to the needy in our little society and decided to use her talents, carefully honed on the cut and thrust of rearing a family in England. She became a volunteer information provider at the Boyle branch of the Citizens Information Centre dispensing information and advice to the mass of disadvantaged people trying to work their way round the well wrought maze of social protection, health, taxation and employment legislation that had been succinctly brought together by successive governments to, at the very least, confuse the most able in our society.
All the departments in these government organizations had been filled over a number of years by a class of people who were more interested in collecting their hefty wage packet at the end of each pay period than in giving sometimes vital help and service to the public. When times became hard and although they had to take cuts in pay which were nowhere near as bad as those employed in the public sector, they , themselves, hardened their outlook on the deserving outside world. Their philosophy was, “I’ve got a job, I’m not earning as much as I used to, so fuck everyone else. Why should I bother my arse helping other people and as for these volunteers, who are doing it for nothing, fuck them. They are only keeping my mate out of a job”
More and more, every day, this philosophy, this canon, was adopted by every public service in the land. They became experts at obfuscation, delay, the need for consultation with their seniors, buck-passing and general zombie-like behaviour which has enraged those who look for help. Now this unresponsive behaviour might well come as a result of policy from the upper echelons of their departments but it does show how these people are willing to embrace this negative atitude to their fellow man. It is amazing how they can sleep at night with this antisocial mantra praying on their minds.
Examples of this behaviour are numerous in every department, in all taxation departments whether the money is being paid to them or especially when they have to pay rebates this total lack of spontaneity and interest is apparent. Throughout all departments of the HSE and especially in the department responsible for the issue of medical cards to the old and needy for free medical assistance this philosophy reigns. Mr James Reilly TD, Minister for Health in Ireland said yesterday “Those who are most vulnerable get looked after” but this is patently not true because Helen has been fighting for the renewal of medical cards for a needy and vulnerable mid-70s couple on limited funds for four months after they had tried unsucessfully themselves for three months prior to asking for help. Note that this is a renewal not an application and Mr Reilly’s department in Finglas just sit there in dumb isolation offering anything but progress in the matter.
Other departments now just do not bother to answer the phone, thus saving themselves the problem of thinking up an excuse. The Small Claims court and the Department of Social Protection who deal with the bulk of benefits must sit in an office 200 yards down the road from their previous handsets, they just do not answer enquiries. If they do this, of course, they do not have to embroil themselves in other people’s problems, but is that not why they are there?
Now even the Citizens Information service is suffering from this same disease. When my wife first joined this organization whose ethos was to help the disadvantaged of society she found the bottom layers consisted of an admirable bunch of unpaid volunteer information providers doing their best for others but when she had to go upstairs to talk to the paid management level she found the same malaise, the same disinterest as in other branches of the public service. The management were only there to propagate their own positions, they were not interested in the ethos or the progress of their organization nor did they have the skills to improve or even carry out their departments purpose which is to empower citizens in their rights and entitlements. These managers could at their best only organise meetings to discuss nothing but just to be there. Results did not enter the equation.
In all my wife’s four years in this most unenviable of tasks and with every public department she applied to, she was initially surprised and then desparately worried at the lack of any determination and application in these sectors. She found the levels of interest and help abysmally low. There was no enthusiasm, care or willingness from the public face of these departments. Nobody could bother their arses when it came to solving a problem or even to consider the sad cases that she put before them.
For Ireland to drag itself out of this morass it finds itself in, something first has to be done to reset the moral compasses of those that languish in the public sector, which I understand is approximately half of the working population of this country. A stiff task for any body especially that inert body they call the Dail but hopefully there might be a latter-day Daniel O’Connell in our midst.