Number of public servants to rise to 370,000 over next 19 months

Ireland will have a much larger permanent public service in the aftermath of Covid-19 with the number of public servants rising to 370,000 over the next 19 months, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has said.

Michael McGrath said that one of the consequences arising out of the pandemic would be “a larger State and a larger public service”.

Speaking on Thursday at a webinar organised by TASC, the think-tank social change Mr McGrath said health recruitment alone would account for an additional 16,000 extra employees across 2021.

Until the pandemic struck in March of last year, the number of public servants was just above 300,000 but Mr McGrath said the expansion necessitated by Covid-19 would be permanent.

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“We will need to have a larger state in key areas such as health… We have also made the step change decision to increase capacity of the public system in healthcare.

He said that expansion would have to be funded through revenue or borrowing but it was the genuine view of Government that, in the medium-to-long term, economic recovery would “do the vast bulk of the heavy lifting” when it came to paying for it.

Mr McGrath said the Government was fully committed to Sláintecare, which will provide universal access to public healthcare.

He said the full implementation of the policy would take “many years” and the key challenge now was to ensure capacity.

He said the new Sláintecare public medical consultant contract would be brought before Oireachtas in the next number of weeks.

“It will be a decisive shift in the way consultants are paid. All new contracts will be public only. We will have a parallel private healthcare system for people who want to go that route,” he said.

Fiscal consolidation

Mr McGrath said that there were no plans or fiscal consolidation and the Government. The EU fiscal rules have been set aside and the Government has flexibility to run higher budget deficits.

He said that the assumptions made in the October Budget about a no-deal Brexit and the absence of a comprehensive vaccination programme had not been correct and that was positive.

However, he said the Government had assumed for a series of short lockdowns, not the prolonged lockdown the State is currently experiencing.

“The extent of the costs incurred and the period (of lockdown) is deeper and longer than we anticipated.”

Asked about spending reductions or tax increases this year, he said “our thinking is not in that space. We are not thinking about what fiscal consolidation looks like.

“There are 480,000 people on Pandemic Unemployment Payment and 115,000 of them lost their jobs last March, immediately on the first lockdown.”

Mr McGrath also criticised the culture of leaking within Government parties. “The weekly meeting of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties, they might as well be live-streamed,” he said.

“I find it frustrating. You might speak for 20 minutes and one line gets leaked. The context is not presented.

“Leaks are damaging. There will be times when you need private hard discussions where you can have confidence to speak you mind without worrying it will be on Twitter five minutes later.”