With foreign nationals comprising 12% of the workforce, why are only four out of the Revenue's 7,000 employees non-Irish, asks Gerald Flynn
IN RECENT times, foreign nationals may well have got jobs in Ireland shortly after their arrival but they have little hope of getting one in the Civil Service or in local administration. About a one in 50 chance in fact. Actually about a one in 1,750 chance, if they go for a nice, pensionable position in the Revenue Commissioners.
Instead, they have a much better one in three chance of getting a nice, low-paid job in a hotel or restaurant without any pension complications.
An International Diversity Conference last week, sponsored by the Public Appointments Service, highlighted the very low recruitment levels of newer migrants into public administration positions.
This is allied to disturbing findings that members of minority, migrant or ethnic groups have reported much higher personal experiences of discrimination in accessing public services. A benign interpretation is that the migrant "clients" feel distanced from officials and misinterpret their approach and cultural differences as being discriminatory.
A less benign view is that the public service has failed to face up to issues of ethnic diversity and that the traditional Irish-born and educated people in public administrative positions have little empathy or ability to deal with problems faced by non-Irish, non-English-speaking "clients".
State agencies have been slower than commercial institutions, such as banks, travel agencies or law firms, to recruit eastern European, Asian or African people, opting instead for multilingual websites or engaging interpreters where necessary.
This failure is widely recognised by senior public service managers but they have to operate within strict recruitment rules which favour Anglophones, preferably with a sound knowledge of Irish social and administrative systems.
Promotional positions in the Civil Service are closely guarded by the mainly unionised State employees. Even an advertised vacancy for someone fluent in Polish, Mandarin or Russian may annoy some who feel that an Irish person with a dictionary and a dial-up translation service could fill the job just as well.
This issue was touched on at the conference by the chairwoman of the Revenue Commissioners, Josephine Feehily, who has decades of experience in senior human resource management.
She acknowledged that no trade union had ever stood in the way of diversity initiatives but said they did not always appreciate that diversity in the workforce may require overt action to enhance recruitment of minorities. This is not particularly new as many public service unions fought a long battle to resist moving from promotion by seniority, even though it often discriminated against talented women in the public service.
The Revenue wants to be able to assist all people in the State who fall within the tax or refund regime and, increasingly, wants to ensure that the growing numbers of migrant entrepreneurs enjoy the pleasures of self-assessment and of being tax-compliant, irrespective of their expectations in their home countries or cultures.
The Revenue Commissioners have a bit to go, though, given that only four out of its 7,000 employees are non-Irish. If foreign nationals were lucky enough to land a job there, they would be joining just three Polish people and one Italian. The public service cannot set language or nationality quotas any more than it can specify that it wants to recruit more 30-somethings or Presbyterians.
This poses problems in achieving Ms Feehilly's ambition that the "public service in a democracy needs to go a fair distance to be representative of the general population". Positive discrimination may be an answer but that can bring other difficulties, as experienced in the United States when it attempted social engineering with the use of quotas for access to educational and employment opportunities.
An option adopted in some countries is to have different entry-tracks so that applicants from minorities or ethnic groups are screened and not selected purely on the basis of written tests or presentation skills in English.
These are often tied to representation targets. If there was a similar system in Ireland, about one in every nine public servants would be not be Irish-born.
From a recruitment perspective, that may be unrealistic in that the number of foreign nationals in the workforce has more than doubled over the past four years, to about 12 per cent.
However, it does indicate that the traditional concepts of fair employment rules may have to be revisited to ensure a more representative public service.
This is an issue which is beginning to be addressed. The majority of organisations comprising the Employers Diversity Network are public service agencies and semi-State companies.
This network is due to produce some research results shortly which will show that the traditional approach towards recruiting for the plum, pensionable and secure jobs that every traditional parent wished for their offspring will have to be radically adjusted over the next few years to ensure ethnic, racial and cultural balance.
Gerald Flynn is an employment specialist with Align Management Solutions in Dublin.
gflynn@alignmanagement.net
