The second issue is does the management have the respect of the people they are meant to be leading (issues of the legitimacy of authority come in here)? If you are in charge then everything is your fault; if something goes wrong you have made the wrong decision, hired the wrong people, failed to train your people properly, incorrectly allocated resources or failed to anticipate a problem. Do the people in charge accept that position? If not they need to be replaced.
I understand the sentiment here but I do detect that the overall approach here is to transform public sector management to operate in similar vein, with similar targets and output measurements, as that which is applied in the private sector. Certainly there is a lot of commonality in the fundamental operations of any organisation, but there is very little similarity in measuring outputs.
For example, a private organisation can point to increased sales, revenues, market share etc. In the public sector, how do we define success? If the government was to increase the Garda numbers by 100% and crime was eliminated (including alleged criminality within the force), is that a price worth paying? Or having achieved a crimeless society, is that the time to start cutting expenditure on Garda number?
If there was zero crime, would we be wondering what we were paying all those Gardaí for? Or is it because we spend so much on Garda numbers and resources that crime was reduced to zero?
The third issue is the vested interests within the State sector. That means Unions, industry lobby groups, local lobby groups etc. They either have to engage positively and productively or be shut out of the process completely.
In what way do unions not engage positively and productively? They are simply representing the views of their members, how is that not a positive and productive thing?
Other countries have done this, New Zealand being the best example as they are similar in size and culture to us. We can and should do it. We just have to start by making it the main topic of public discourse.
New Zealand ranks somewhere around 30th richest country in the world compared to Ireland, consistently top 10. Inequality is on the rise, house prices are in a bubble, increasing numbers of the population are reliant on welfare, child poverty is increasing, suicide rates are increasing....It does of course have its good side, its Debt/GDP ratio is less than 40% - but we had something similar before it was decided to bailout out bankrupt banks.
Thatcherite politics of sacking the entire civil service has not produced any panacea to resolving public service inefficiencies.