How big is too big? Government weighs future of public service in a time of population growth
The era of “endless recruitment everywhere” in the public service is over, Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers warned over the summer. It was a very different message from that delivered by his Fianna Fáil predecessor six years earlier. In November 2020, Michael McGrath said that, coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ireland would “inevitably have a larger State”. While some Government actions in response to the outbreak of Covid were temporary, “we have also made decisions that will result in a permanently larger public service”, he said. McGrath’s predictions certainly have come to pass. Over the last decade, the number of whole-time equivalent (WTE) staff on the State’s payroll increased by about 120,000, according to an analysis carried out by The Irish Times. In 2015 there were 301,589 WTEs employed across the public service, which includes civil servants, gardaí, health staff, those working in local authorities and non-commercial State agencies, along with personnel in the Defence Forces . Chambers told the Dáil in April that at the beginning of this year, there were 417,464 WTE personnel. He said numbers had increased by 2.6 per cent in 2025 alone. Further increases were also planned and the Minister forecast that by the end of December, employment levels in the public service could exceed 438,700 staff. There definitely were arguments supporting an increase in public service numbers. Ireland’s population is both growing and ageing. The Department of Finance ’s Future Forty report last year forecast Ireland’s population could reach 6.77 million by 2065. An ageing population also means greater demands on the public health service. The Department of Health told an Oireachtas committee last week that in the first 10 months of this year, there was a 9 per cent rise in presentations to emergency departments among adults aged 75 and over, the equivalent to almost 17,700 additional patients. “That is well in advance of demographic projections for population growth and ageing,” the department said. The trade union-affiliated Nevin Economic Research Institute argued this week that “public sector employment both as a share of employment and as a share of the population is still down compared to 2008”. While McGrath spoke of a growing public service, the current Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Coalition appears to be considering two things in particular: the most appropriate size of the public service for the State, and how to generate additional value for money. Chambers told The Irish Times employment growth would have to follow the Government’s budgetary strategy, which is to seek more moderate increases in public spending. In a keynote speech in late September, Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Simon Harris said the budget for 2027 could not just be about the additional funding being made available. “That’s important, but what’s more important is the overall level of spending – the size of the State, and what it does and doesn’t do,” he said. Chambers told Ministers in a private letter in September that a planned approach to the size and composition of the public service workforce was central to sustainable pay expenditure over the medium term. “I ask you to evaluate the value for money being achieved with the existing staffing resources and pay allocation for your department (and any bodies under your aegis) and consider where there is scope for improvement through process simplification, reprioritisation, redeployment and other reforms,” he wrote. Chambers, on the day of Budget 2027 in early October, announced the establishment of a new public spending efficiency taskforce to “extensively scrutinise” day-to-day expenditure across Government departments and State agencies. While the number of non-commercial State agencies, including regulators, has increased over recent years – with employment levels growing by about 20,000 – Chambers said there was no Government target to scale back their number. There will be no policy to “cull the quangos”, as Fine Gael promised in its 2011 general election manifesto in the wake of the banking crisis and economic crash that put the public finances under huge pressure. However, he said if the Public Service Efficiency Taskforce recommended consolidation (of agencies or bodies) to drive efficiency in the delivery of public services, he would “be open to it”. Management consultant Eddie Molloy says “An Bord Snip” – as the Government’s expenditure review committee was more colloquially known during its two iterations in 1987 and 2008 – should be reconstituted as the public service had “grown helter-skelter” over recent years. He says public service staffing increases at the rate seen over the last decade were not sustainable and “not warranted” in future. Top-level management at secretary general and assistant secretary general levels – the highest levels in the Civil Service – should be asked annually for their plans to increase productivity and reduce labour costs. This would be common practice in the private sector, he says. Ged Nash, Labour Party spokesman on finance who has tabled parliamentary questions that have yielded details of public service employment levels, said: “We need an honest appraisal of where the public services of this wealthy country should be and what they should look like, out to 2040 and beyond.” He says this examination should “include scale, quality, capacity, expertise, skills and numbers of whole-time equivalents, informed by demographic challenges and our social and economic ambitions for Ireland”. “That would be the mark of a socially ambitious and fiscally responsible Government,” he says. Ciarán Nugent of the Nevin Economic Research Institute says that in 2008, the public sector employed about 360,000 people (excluding semi-states such as Irish Rail and Dublin Bus). That figure represented about one public service worker per 12.5 of the population and 16.2 per cent of the workforce of 2.2 million. “This number had still not recovered from the financial crisis and austerity by the time Covid hit,” he says. “The latest numbers from the Central Statistics Office show an increase of 45,000 public sector workers since then, 35,000 of whom are in healthcare and a further 10,000 in the Civil Service.” As the population is set to grow and age further in the decades to come, these kinds of numbers will be pored over in detail.