How do we improve the permanent government?

OP is right. We are a mess, with a poor system when it comes to the civil service and yes, given the lack of responses, people are a long way for recognising this.

It's going to be the issue for SF in government to deal with. My fear is the very conservative civil service will put blocks in front of them. SF will need balls of steel to stand up to them. Hope they do.

I have always thought that we elect the wrong people .... the real power lies with the civil service and they are totally unaccountable to the general public and in much of my experience, also to the political reps that we elect. The Civil Service laughs at election times... it makes no difference to them as to who is appointed by the electorate as their notional overseers.

But as already been said, politicians can always use the current situation to deflect responsibility from themselves and very few are minded to try and change a system that has worked for the political animal since the state was established.

It is not good enough for a politician to know how to work the unaccountable system, someone needs to challenge and change it. Members of the public should be able to get the services they are entitled to... without having to call in political favours and parish pump political influence. The word 'service' doesn't mean a thing to the civil service who generally distance themselves from the public as much as possible and are delighted that the hapless political buffer exists to keep them isolated from reality.

If John McGuiness is as forward thinking as the first post here indicates, then I hope that he can persuade a few more of his fellow politicians to question the work practices undertaken and the advice given by the civil service.

The civil service cannot resist a political direction, if it is coherent.

The problem is the lack of coherence coming from the political system, which reflects a lack of coherence and common purpose within the electorate.

I'm sure there's many reasons for this lack of common purpose. I think one is the fact that so much of our wealth is generated in the FDI sector. The key strategic decisions made in those companies like Intel etc. are made abroad - so there's no actual connection between Irish politics and those companies - beyond facilitating them in our Tax laws, so that they continue to route their profits here.

Domestic politics is then effectively engaged in shadow boxing; health service unions demanding a bigger share of the tax revenues paid disproportionately by that FDI sector, or heavily subsidised agricultural interests being given an importance far beyond their actual contribution to the economy. With no real effort to form any real common agenda.

So you'll famously come up with something like the housing issue. Where you find existing homeowners don't want the value of their property diluted, and therefore have common cause with property developers. So you see the political system making all kinds of noise about solving the housing crisis - while politicians of (pretty much) all parties oppose planning permissions for badly needed housing projects at local level. And, just for good measure, you find folk in Donegal who self-built houses with bad bricks wanting us all to rebuild their houses brick-by-brick for them - and the politicians don't tell them to just join the queue of people who also have housing needs.

Public service is far from perfect. But politicians prefer to keep the focus there, to distract from their own inability to create some kind of strategic national consensus out of that political quagmire - and that is their job.

Did they tell you to tighten your breeches and shine up your bowler hat too? Honestly, your advisors are living in the past.

If you go for a temporary clerical officer or clerical officer position, your future will be decided by the 2 or 3 people across the table for the 30 minute interview. You can leverage all the contacts and relatives you like, but unless there is some very unusual coincidence, they won't be on the other side of the table making a decision about your future. These are high volume competitions, with large numbers going through. You don't get to choose your interviewers and interviewers don't get to choose their candidates. Candidates will appear before them, the application form will have been sent a day or two before, and the interviewer panel will make a yes or no decision on the spot. That's how recruitment actually works for those competitions.

Instead of spending time networking with contacts, spend your time doing a great application form with no mistakes or typos, and prepare good answers on the competency areas set out in the booklet.

Perhaps you could explain how nepotism comes into play in recruitment when you can't control who will be the decision makers on the interview panel.

He or she probably means a phone call is made and a slip of paper is passed to or a quiet conversation is had with the Chair or member of an interview board.

You'll have no way of knowing who the Chair of interview board will be, to make that call. And if you did find out, you'll be taking a very big gamble that the Chair isn't the kind of person to tell you to go and sh1te, and get the candidate kicked out for canvassing.