2.3.6 Pillar Three - Civil/Public Service

The civil/public service is the method by which a Government (see the Sub-Chapter on Politics) provides necessary services (e.g. health, education, justice etc.) for its population.  It could be said that the civil is the bureaucratic (see next post) part of the public.  Where civil/public service breaks down, countries are said to be failed states.

It is interesting that from 2009 to 2011 Belgium had no elected Government. And in Northern Ireland there was no Government for a few years because the elected politicians could not find enough common ground to talk to each other. In both cases the civil/public service ran the country with little change perceived by the general population. If it was the other way around, both would be called failed states.

A facet of the public service, often observed, is its inflexibility.

It always appears to inhibit creativity, new ideas, and innovation.  It is very cautious.  It invariably measures outcomes in a way that focuses on cost rather than value. This gives rise to the joke about a civil servant being someone who finds a problem in every solution.

But let me unpack this joke a little – because in a way finding problems is necessary in a democracy.

After all, I, a very determined entrepreneur, might have a great idea that involves, say, building a road that will assist efforts to provide employment in an area of high unemployment. But that road would destroy an area of ecological significance. The role of the responsible civil servant in this case is to see the problem in that solution!

This Sub-Chapter will attempt to explore (and critique) the relevance of the values, the behaviour and thereafter the decisions of the Civil/Public Service in the context of the world of the Focus Group.

I mentioned in the previous post that the civil service is the bureaucratic part of the overall service that the Government provides for the population in any country. The public service consists of the people who are doing the providing.  For example, Guards, teachers, doctors/nurses in public hospitals, soldiers, firepersons etc. are all public servants.

Let us consider the word bureaucracy for a moment.  The word comes from the French word bureau meaning desk (or office) and the Greek word kratos meaning power. 

Suppose I set up a factory to make potato crisps.  One side of the venture is the operational side; that is, the buying of the potatoes, the slicing up, the frying, the packing, i.e. the actual making of the crisps, and then the ferrying of them to shops.  There may be a marketing side to advertise my crisps and a financial side to borrow money for new plant and/or collect money from people who are selling them.  When my business gets to be bigger I might need a transport element to bring the crisps farther afield and so on.

In order to pull all the strands of the business together, I will need to have an office.  The office is staffed by people who pay the wages, collect order forms and send bills, make sure that everyone is at work on time, arrange meetings with customers and suppliers, and all the little jobs that need to be done.  The thing about these little jobs is that if they were not done, and done really well, the entire operation would fall asunder. 

The office power is the bureaucracy of the business, and is really the fulcrum around which every aspect of the business revolves!  Usually, the people who work in, or run the bureaucracies are called administrators or secretaries.  Anywhere there is a significant amount of operational work going on there will be a bureaucracy.  In bigger organisations and businesses there will be smaller bureaucracies answering to a higher-up bureaucracy.

Let us now consider bureaucracy in organisations that support vulnerable people.

One thing that I have observed is that the value of the bureaucracy in such organisations can be judged by how close decisions are 1): to common sense, and 2): the needs of the people in the operational side.

People on the ground (or in the front-line [1] to use a military expression) mostly do not have the status (or often the knowledge) to influence decisions that can be very important to a vulnerable person.

But bureaucracies do.

And the civil service, being a huge bureaucracy is, generally, far more in touch with the needs of its Pillars’ masters than it is with the needs of vulnerable people.  And while individual bureaucrats might be very innovative, passionate, hard-working, sincerely concerned and dedicated, what I will call the bullying power of mediocrity [2] seems to be very pervasive in the big bureaucracy.  This often hinders creativity.

Now the most important thing about a bureaucracy is that it knows its place!  If it starts to wield power beyond that which it is responsible for, or gets notions above its station, then it runs the risk of it being more of a destructive force within the organisation than something that supports the operational day-to-day work – as it was set up to do.

It has to be said that the private sector is, generally, far better at operating bureaucracies than the public/civil service, where it tends to have very negative connotations.  And part of the reason why it has such negative connotations is that it has a certain image.

That is, it has a tendency to, as I said above, act above its station and make rules and regulations, and then impose them, even if they don’t make any sense to the worker on the ground. If this happened in the private sector the organisation would start losing money so it would stop quickly enough.

Sometimes these rules that make no sense might favour particular vested interests that the rule-makers have to bow to because of political, power, media, legal (or even sometimes academic, or status) type pressure – but really the civil service should be structured so that it can face down or at least challenge such interests.

One very wasteful example of office power is the renting of offices around the country by state agencies that could be purchased for a lot less, in the long run, than the cost of annual rent.

Another stark example of office power is regeneration, where large numbers of houses are knocked in troubled estates because they are deemed to be beyond repair. As one witty woman very perceptively said to me as we were discussing it one day ‘Why knock the houses, they did nothing wrong’.

Obviously some civil servants consider it a good idea – probably because they find it difficult to think outside the system – or else they are bending to their political masters, who may be, in turn, bending to the will of their friends in the demolition and/or construction industry. I have no idea!

During the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland planning permission was granted to build housing estates miles from nowhere where people didn’t need them at all while houses where people did need them were knocked.

Who knows why nonsensical decisions are made?

Another favoured approach by the civil service to solve problems is (if they can afford it) to add a few layers of professionals, or layers of more bureaucrats – most of whom find it very difficult to be creative or take the risks needed to effect real and enduring change.

Later I will describe reductionism – that is, the breaking down of complex problems into their constituent parts to solve them – in more detail.

Unfortunately for anyone promoting the holistic way of working – that is, looking at complex problems in their totality – bureaucrats are almost always reductionist in their thinking.

Of course, this tension can sometimes be a very positive thing in an organisation – but in the civil service it appears to lean so far towards the logical that the holistic is almost always afforded lower priority! (The post on the relevance of complex variables in supporting vulnerable people in a later Chapter will expand on this theme).

Because of this there is usually tension between the reductionist/logical way of looking at the world (needed by the bureaucracy) and the empathic/holistic way (needed by practitioners on the ground who appreciate the interconnectedness of things).

Having said all the above, I personally know, and have worked with, some really good bureaucrats.

A good bureaucrat possesses the ability to keep important routine going, have an eye for what’s needed by the organisation, be aware of something that is on the horizon that might be too high risk and pose a danger, or indeed, spot things that might be advantageous, advise others as to what these are, and at all times be aware of one’s place and status in the organisation.

And the good bureaucrat is of immense value!

[1]. Sometimes I feel that if I use the term front-line work people will think that it implies that not only are people who come looking for help the enemy, but that we practitioners are in trenches defending mainstream life.

[2]. I borrowed this term from the writer D.H. Lawrence.  I have no idea which of his books I saw it in but it stuck in my mind.

I decided to include this post on the hierarchy of helping people as I am not that enthusiastic about hierarchy and if I observe too much of it I tend to have a reaction!

Some years ago I was at a conference on desistance (that is, as I explained already, stopping young people getting involved in crime) and the principal speaker was a professor from a University outside Ireland.

During her longish address she talked about a thing she called a TSO.

The professor obviously assumed that everyone in the room knew what a TSO was – I didn’t. However, after a while I became aware that it stood for Third Sector Organisation – that is, a community and/or voluntary organisation.

After another while I copped on (I’m generally fairly slow to cop-on) that the First Sector (which, strangely, wasn’t called an FSO), was the statutory sector (public and civil service) and, unbelievably, the Second Sector (not referred to as an SSO) was private enterprise!

Her principal argument was that a TSO (relegated to the bronze medal, like the Third World used to be) did the easy work in criminal justice intervention, (as she called it), were well-meaning but not really accountable, and had poorer outcomes than the 1^st and 2^nd Sectors.

Now I think that it was the context in which she placed Third that got me thinking. (After all, a Third Level education is more esteemed than a First Level or Second Level. But it was obvious from the way her talk proceeded that the professor associated Third with lesser importance)!

I know – I’m being a bit provocative here to make a point. Such terminology doesn’t seem to have caught on in Ireland and I haven’t seen much of it in publications, websites etc. emanating from foreign lands in recent years – so maybe the term is dying out. And some might say that I’m being very picky, or petty.

But I really do believe that language is important.

In a very subtle way it forms our opinions and influences how we think about things. After all, that is why the term Developing World (instead of Third World) came into usage. (Actually this term is now also falling into disuse).

Getting back to the conference, the professor proposed that Government needed to pay by results, that the voluntary sector was wasteful, and finally, horror of horrors, that the statutory sector might find it difficult to control the community and voluntary sector!

Walking to the station in the rain (it was a very wet day) I was thinking about her talk and I found myself disagreeing with her assertion that the community/voluntary sector are not involved in the difficult end – in fact, in my experience, who she referred to as the First Sector are champions at putting up barriers to insulate their practitioners from difficult or uncomfortable emotional messiness. (I will expand on this a little in the next post).

(Now, many practitioners working in the statutory sector do get involved in the emotional messiness end, but, mostly, it is their individual choice).

And I’m not sure if I was right, but the suspicious part of my brain kicked in when she spoke about payment by results – was this a softening up for privatisation of services —— including prisons?

And the many years’ experience part of my brain kicked in when she talked about waste. To state that the voluntary sector is more wasteful than the statutory sector, was, I felt, very wrong. And in respect of control, in my opinion private companies (the Second Sector – silver medallists) are far more difficult to control than voluntary organisations.

Of course, you will say, this is some years ago and maybe we’ve moved on.

Unfortunately – not a lot! While I chose this example because it was at the more explicit end, I have listened (and listen) to lectures/talks right up to the time of writing this website that were/are not much different.

For example, I attended an interesting seminar very recently by an academic on how vulnerable or marginalised communities might protect children/young people growing up in them.

While it was indeed interesting, almost all the content was concerned with problems, and viewed through the lens of policing, anti-social behaviour, profiles of offenders etc. A tiny segment was given to solutions. One of the solutions was intensive family support but there was no reference at all as to what this would look like on the ground.

The norm in such talks/lectures/seminars is that reference is made to all the other research that is being done, or has been done that leads to the findings in the research which is the subject of the talk.  Generally, leading academics, policy providers, justice professionals are those who have written the research, the content of which is – almost always – based on information supplied by staff working in the community/voluntary sector or families in the Focus Group.

Such talks are invariably well delivered, interesting and informative – and in each one I learn something.

But there is rarely if ever any mention of the power of inspiration, love, human potential, the positive effects of genuine warm relationship, or tapping into the wisdom of families themselves in encouraging young people who are hurt and distressed to make positive and life affirming choices.

It’s as if such things are inconsequential and irrelevant. Or on a different planet, or in a parallel universe as I hear people saying nowadays!

And when listening I often find myself wondering what outcomes would emerge if it was the other way around.

Suppose a group of concerned family members, disadvantaged people, people who are or have been in prison, victims of crime, homeless people, and similar had a chat over a cup of tea about the effectiveness of the statutory criminal justice interventions, (that is, the best and worst of justice, health and education professionals).

Would their findings be the same?

Now in the context of this website, there is a very significant point about the statutory-bodies-doing-the-real-work-and-making-the-hard-decisions thinking that the professor who I mentioned in the previous post asserted.

That is, I believe that it is analogous to traditional Mammy and Daddy thinking.

In this way, Daddy, (like the statutory bodies) is always insulated from the pain, muddle, disorder and uncertainty of the day to day child-rearing.  Mammy handles all this – lest it be too much for Daddy’s fragile emotions.

In the wait-till-your-father-gets-home scenario, Mammy will put up with, suffer, or tolerate all the difficult emotional messiness (as well as, of course, enjoy the intimacy and warmth) involved in rearing small children all day and then report to Daddy on his return as to who has been good and who has been bad.  Daddy will then dish out appropriate rewards or punishments (but usually punishments) in a distant, detached but (ideally, anyway) fair manner.

But, Mammy does not have the final say in decision making – indeed, she is relegated to lower status in this respect – lest she be too emotional and – even – leave some bold children unpunished because of her compassion!  No; all the hard decisions are left to cool, detached, Daddy.

Of course, I am exaggerating here. Nowadays – typically – parenting is far more inclusive of both the male and the female authority figures, and both make hard decisions in their own way.  But the similarity to the description that the professor gave of the First Sector and the Third Sector couldn’t escape me.

When making the so-called hard decisions, statutory agencies are, generally, becoming more and more removed, and better at insulating themselves from pain, emotions, and uncertainty – and many community and voluntary organisations are following suit. These are the challenges that traditional-Daddy has actually risen to over the past few generations in family life!

I’m not sure why this is – but I have hoticed it as more and more regulation comes in, with, in parallel, formality replacing informality. If that’s the way organisations are going – and it seems to be, with the blessing of the public and civil service – then they are way off the mark when compared to the typical modern family, where (mostly) informality now prevails over formality!

As you will see when you read the Chapter on the Family Support Shamrock, creativity is inhibited by formality and the aloofness and distance that accompanies it.

And creativity, so important in healthy growth and development in the good enough family – and, I believe, so important in our work that I devote a full Chapter to it later – is generally in short supply among many organisations that support people in distress.

Much of this comes from fear.

Think about it – how can we support families and children when we are more fearful of taking a risk (creativity always involves taking a risk) and the messiness and uncertainty that goes with it, and/or getting something wrong than when we trust that things will be okay?

From the point of view of our existence, uncertainty, messiness (and pain, chaos and emotionality) are all part of our lives.  If they are overwhelming they have a destructive effect on us – but in small doses they prove to us that we are alive! 

A tolerable amount of pain has value in our psyche like inoculation has value in the physical body. Wise people learn this – that pain cannot be totally eliminated.

Indeed, one of the major paradoxes of humanity is that we try to eliminate pain, emotionality, uncertainty and messiness – not realising that they all have value.

Very often, statutory funders (Government Departments) contract out work to voluntary agencies to work in areas such as homelessness, crime in estates, unemployment etc.

Mostly these initiatives are started by concerned citizens, religious or philanthropic groups, or similar with seed funding and then after some time the Government steps in to give some permanency to the initiative.  (If it feels that the initiative is not yielding any results, or is too uppity, i.e. too demanding, is non-compliant, or will embarrass them if something goes wrong – the Government will usually not support it).

When the Government does offer financial support it will usually (in my experience anyway) only give barely enough money to do the minimum and will expect the voluntary agencies to work for less money and poorer conditions than they would their own employees – i.e. civil or public servants.  (I actually heard a representative from a Government Department, one day, saying that it would be a lot cheaper to give a certain task to a voluntary agency than employ more public servants to do the same job…….  I think that he forgot I was in the room)!

The bare minimum approach often results in voluntary organisations having responsibility without power and this usually causes frustration and sometimes even conflict among those agencies that are working in partnership with each other.

The problems that families in the Focus Group present with can often seem overwhelming – even infinite – but they only appear infinite because we are looking at the problems in a reductionist, not systemic way.  Because Pillars thinking filters into the community; this is not uncommon.

If we look at the problems systemically we might ask different questions and get different answers.

I’d also argue that very often the Pillars, (perhaps unwittingly) complicate issues which make them appear to be overwhelming.  I have experienced the Pillars actually adding to chaos and incoherence by trying to reduce problems – that is, tackle each one individually – rather than seeing the whole family as a unit, or system.

The civil/public service can also make things hard to understand, using concepts and language that is beyond the ken of not only many people in the Focus Group, but many of us practitioners in communities.

Complication of issues is also, of course, a method of perpetuating dominance.

One day I was at a meeting about homelessness and its effect on children and the room was full of passionate people who were genuinely concerned about protecting children who, we knew, were going to be homeless soon. We were all practitioners working in voluntary agencies on the ground, or, at the coalface, as we say!

We were discussing how to reach such children with the limited resources that are available.  As we discussed creative ways of including a family who had all nine of the characteristics described in the Sub-Chapter on the Focus Group, (who might do what, what might have a better chance of working, and how many agencies would be involved etc. etc.), I was thinking ‘we can’t have families picking and choosing’.

My thought was sparked by my exasperation. However when I took time to reflect I was not at all proud! I realised that it was a kind of take it or leave it sentiment. It was, I suppose, a response to frustration arising from scarcity of resources.

However it was also born of Pillars thinking.

Let us say that I want my child to be fluent in Mongolian [1].  The school that he attends won’t suddenly drop subjects that are necessary for the education of the vast majority of children so I can have my way.  (I am fairly sure – though I haven’t checked – that the same would apply in a Mongolian school if a parent wanted their child to learn Gaeilge).

Pillars thinking will ordain that when it comes to education, a universal, mainstream pedagogy will fulfil the needs of the majority and that this will suffice for the education of almost all children.

To expect anything else would be unreasonable.

In other words, the Department of Education cannot have me picking and choosing, and if I want my child to learn Mongolian I should have to pay for it myself because hardly any children want to learn Mongolian, nor is it deemed to be an important language for a school leaver in Ireland to have.  (There is, also, of course, the scarcity of the resource, i.e. teachers of Mongolian)! The curriculum is the curriculum, and I, the parent, have to take it or leave it!

However, when this kind of thinking filters into the helping areas, in particular those areas that support families in the Focus Group, it becomes problematic.  That is because the issue is not actually about families picking and choosing; it’s about me as a practitioner being able to collaborate, listen, adapt, and respond in a human way, even if there may be nothing practical that I can do to solve the actual problem at that time. 

The suffering experienced by a child who is isolated, poor, highly anxious, suicidal, and abandoned is more likely to be a lot worse, and have far more implications for society, than a child who cannot learn Mongolian. And if her family leaves it, because they have not the wherewithal to take it, it has more serious consequences than someone leaving a subject in mainstream education.

In our family support projects, by definition, we try and make up for deficits in the functioning of the family, or, to put it another way, try and fill the emotional gaps in families.

The fervent hope of virtually all practitioners that I know or have known is that this holding will assist the family in getting a kind of breathing space, or respite, so that they can ultimately find strengths within themselves to function in a healthier way.  In order to do this, practitioners need to be empathic with the family.

The civil/public service rarely if ever looks through the eyes of, (or tries to walk in the shoes of) people who are suffering.  Individual statutory practitioners will do it, and often do it very well, but, mostly, their opinions struggle to be heard amidst all the other imperatives that are driving policy and practice.

And many of the members of the families that are affected by imprisonment displease society at large.  In this respect, families often feel that they have lesser rights than those who please society – and, in particular, don’t have a right to be uppity.

[1]. I’m just picking the country of Mongolia because I was listening recently to Mongolian Throat Singing – absolutely marvelous if you haven’t haven’t ever listened to it. So the country is on my mind.

When parents, by their economic choices, neglect their children we are obliged to report that neglect to the State. 

When the State, by its economic choices neglect children who do we report it to?

The power of the civil and public service is such that it is almost unassailable.

To demonstrate this I will list just a small sample of decisions that impact, I believe, on all of us citizens. All of them (I think anyway) are harmful to mainstream society and some of them are particularly harmful to the Focus Group. They all have to be signed off by the civil service, some, I imagine, at a fairly high civil service level.  Some of them are cultural, and many of them are responses to political pressure from lobby groups that influence the Pillars. 

I’d like you to consider the long term effects (last line in each example) that you think is more likely to be true, i.e. whether or not, in your opinion, the decision Saves Money or Costs Money, or Benefits Society. You can put a simple yes or no for each option.

And when I say saves money or costs money, please note that I mean our money – i.e. the money of the taxpayer. I expect that the readers of this website will be ordinary people – not economists.  (Though if there are any economists out there reading this – welcome)! 

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The above questions do not have any purpose except to get us thinking about things that go on and on and on, and are so commonplace that we feel that they would be impossible to challenge or change!

They all have high impact – low noticeability.

The thing about the civil/public services is that, (like the other Pillars) mostly, people who work in them have been included in society so they might not have any direct experience of exclusion – or at least the kind of exclusion that the Focus Group experience.

Some may have grown up in families where one or more members might have not fitted in or were excluded because of problems they had, or displayed nonconformist behaviour, but that is different to exclusion from society at large.

Exclusion and its running mate isolation are two particularly excruciating experiences.  (For example, I have often experienced parents whose children are getting on well academically in school being very worried if their children are not making friends, i.e. are not included)!

So, (apart from concerned practitioners who work in it) the civil/public service, generally speaking, tends to be disconnected from the problems of poverty and disadvantage and is largely unaware of the real issues.

Many planners (and some practitioners too) find it difficult to understand how people can be so stubborn, selfish, uncaring and neglectful that they don’t toddle along obediently to attend the programme that was designed (and cost a fortune) to help them.

In many large scale institutions (e.g. a University or the Gardaí, the civil service itself) a certain amount of mediocrity can be held and the number of people who suffer because of that mediocrity, and the nature of their suffering, (while I’m not wishing to underestimate it), can be managed and accommodated.

However in an agency charged with the protection of very vulnerable children, (like an A+E Department in a hospital, a search and rescue service, or the fire brigade) mediocrity cannot be tolerated – because the work is a matter of life and death.

I mention this because if we who work in child protection get it right, children will thrive but if we get it wrong there is a higher risk that they will embark on a trajectory of addiction, harm to self and others, ending up in trouble with the law etc. and ultimately experience the different forms of distress and even tragic occurrences that I have outlined in the post listing the characteristics of the Focus Group and the scenarios described.

This does not mean that mistakes cannot be made, but the ‘Yes Minister’ [1] type thinking that would be very harmful in A+E departments or search and rescue services should be considered to be out of bounds in the child protection agency also.

The civil/public service funds many voluntary agencies to tackle issues of social inclusion and disadvantage.  However the conditions under which the funding is given usually ensures that people who are supposed to benefit do not really have a voice in choosing the assistance that they need.

When it comes to the Focus Group, many voluntary agencies know that the civil-public service won’t do it right, so, (like is often done with the addict that won’t stop misusing drugs), community workers are often engaged in harm reduction, compensating for the deficits that families experience when dealing with the statutory side [2]. (Of course, there are individual practitioners working in the Pillars that do the same)!

Mediocrity leads to frustration for people like me and many readers like you.  But, over many years, we have got used to it and accommodated it into our day-to-day lives.  For some very vulnerable people it may actually be life threatening. 

[1]. I explained the reference to Yes, Minister in a previous Chapter; see also the post on the Impact on the Focus Group of Pillars thinking.

[2]. I come across this quite a bit!