President’s Remarks at a Reception for Senior Public Service (SPS)
Áras an Uachtaráin, Dublin, Friday, 23rd September, 2011
Dia dhíbh go léir a chairde, is cúis mhór áthais duinn fáilte a chur romhaibh go léir chuig Áras an Uachtaráin inniu
Good evening everyone and welcome to Áras an Uachtaráin. It’s great to see so many of you here thanks to the help we received from Secretary General Robert Watt and his colleague- and our former colleague - Triona Quill. We gather so that I can say thank you to you and through you to your colleagues for the very considerable and consistent support I have received from the public service. That support has taken many forms – from the provision of routine and ongoing advice, to the preparation of speech material, to logistical support for visits abroad and for major national events and ceremonies at home. But no matter what the form of support or the occasion I have always greatly appreciated the outstanding courtesy and professionalism with which the Public Service has engaged with my Office.
We are living and working through awkward and very uncomfortable times. The economic difficulties have impacted adversely on many lives generating a mood of anger and negativity. The public service has been on the front line, as staff take reduced pay and benefits, as public services come under pressure delivering essential services but with reduced resources. Tension levels are high, there is forensic scrutiny and critical commentary of an order that does not conduce to high morale.
So this is the kind of moment of change where good leaders are essential to re-imagine possibilities, to explore fresh opportunities, to motivate and to generate momentum for a drive forward.
The Senior Public Service has been established at a seriously crucial juncture in our national life. Henry Ford once said ‘Coming together is a beginning, Keeping together is progress, Working together is Success.’ You each represent specialisms but, just as in the world of academic research it has been imperative to progress to ensure fluency of communication and collaboration between disciplines and departments, so too in the Public Service it is absolutely essential that the walls that mark one area of specialist service off from another are not impermeable. Each specialist department or agency launches from the same platform of public service and reaches for the same end result - an administration that is galvanised to work at its absolute best in the interests of and at the service of the people.
It is your individual and collective roles as senior public service that creates not only the dynamism in your own particular sphere but ensures that the overarching common goals are respected and advanced through the fluency and ease of communications and synergies you create between yourselves, with our Government and with our people.
The array of experience and expertise in this room is outstanding. We rely on it to bring us through this very rough patch to more solid ground. There are many showcases of the good you accomplish, none more remarkable than the massive time, imagination and perseverence invested in constructing peace on this island and reconstructing relationships that had been skewed by a toxic past. I hope the success garnered there against the tide of cynicism and frustration gives you, as it should, profound confidence in your ability to deliver effective solutions to the many problems that land on the desk of the public service.
We look to you. We depend on you. We lean on you but do not always appreciate you or thank you. Today I want to say thank you and to encourage you to cast out into the deep, for the farther shore that Seamus Heaney talks of, to lead us beyond the flintiness of the moment to a renewed faith in ourselves and our country through the evidence that comes from strategies that deliver and deliver to the highest standard possible.
Please enjoy each others company and maybe even get to know colleagues whom you have not had a chance to meet before, where he or she works and whether there might be some points of intersection with your interests or activities.
I wish you well as you go about the work of rebuilding confidence and prosperity in our country and I hope you have a pleasant evening here in Áras an Uachtaráin.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.