Sean Byrne writes: On a wet and windy October morning in 1975 I presented myself, as instructed in a letter from the Civil Service Commission, at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to begin work as an Administrative Officer. The main operations of the Department were then in the GPO and the offices were entered through Prince’s Street. As I looked around the gloomy vestibule to see how I might get to the ‘Establishment Section’ a small man in what looked like a postman’s uniform slithered off a strange hooded chair saying ‘Which floor? Which floor?’ ‘I must go to the Establishment section,’ I said. ‘Third floor, third floor, room 306, room 306’ said the man, who seemed to suffer from echolalia.
He cranked a handle on a wall beside the grid of a lift shaft and a lift descended with much clanking and grinding. It bore me to the third floor, where the door to room 306 was opened by a thin, nervous man in his thirties who said: ‘Oh yes, Mr Byrne, the new AO, blocking a HEO post.’ He did not explain what a HEO was nor in what way I was impeding the progress of this functionary. I discovered that a HEO was a Higher Executive Officer and that the post I was to fill had previously been filled by a HEO and that I was regarded as usurping that role. Graduate Administrative Officers were a relatively new phenomenon in the Civil Service and were resented by officials who had entered from school. In the office with the thin man was another official, hidden behind a newspaper, above which a cloud of cigarette smoke hung. He lowered the newspaper for a moment to glare at me and then resumed his reading. The thin man introduced himself as Mr F but did not introduce his baleful colleague.
Mr F instructed me to a sign a document which asserted that I had read and would abide by the provisions of the Official Secrets Act. Mr F gave me a copy of the Act and said ‘You may read it if you want to but nobody reads it unless there is a PQ,’ he said. A PQ, I learned, was a Parliamentary Question asked of a Minister by a Dáil deputy. Mr F told me that I had been assigned to the General Section and led me to a large room with grey walls and dirty windows in which eight people were sitting at desks surrounded by untidy piles of paper. There were six men and two young women, comprising a higher executive officer, two executive officers, three clerical officers and the two young women who were clerical assistants. One young man barely acknowledged my arrival as he agitatedly shifted papers from one pile to another. He was in his twenties, not much older than I was, and seemed to suffer some unspoken anguish as he sometimes wept silently. One of the two young women, ethereally pale with luxuriant auburn hair was gazing dreamily through the window. The other, wearing lavish makeup, was filing her nails. Those young women processed data about television licences but as this data arrived at irregular intervals, they often had nothing to do.
The General Section dealt with the implementation of broadcasting legislation and all matters to do with the licencing of telecommunications but also, bizarrely, with ‘Discipline’, The ‘Discipline’ function related to misdemeanours committed in the course of their work by employees of the Department of Post and Telegraphs. I recall seeing a file on a postman in the West of Ireland who stole a woman’s garments from her clothesline. His offence was considered particularly reprehensible as the woman whose clothes he had stolen had provided him with cups of tea on cold mornings. His punishment was to have two ‘increments’, that is annual increases in salary, stopped.
I was given various Acts governing broadcasting and telecommunications to read, together with ‘Statutory Instruments’, which were the detailed means by which Acts were implemented. On the desks of my colleagues and piled in heaps on the floor were files tied with the infamous red tape which in fact is a dull orange colour. The files read from front to back with the latest documents on top. The papers were meant to be filed in date order with the most recent documents on top but often they were put on haphazardly so that the narrative of the file became garbled. The files were stored and distributed by the ‘Registry’, where a number of clerical assistants worked under a Miss C recording the movements of the files. Miss C wore the same grubby dress and cardigan for weeks on end. She rarely washed her person or her hair and a cigarette dangled permanently from the corner of her mouth. At Christmas some officials gave boxes of chocolates to the girls in the Registry in appreciation of their carrying out dreary tasks. Miss C locked the chocolates in a filing cabinet where their decayed remains were found after her eagerly awaited retirement.
The movements of files were recorded by the Registry so that their whereabouts could always be determined. If Mr A requested a file, it was marked out to him and when he was finished with it, he ought to have returned it to Registry. But Mr B might also wish to consult that file and learning from Registry that Mr A had it he would get it from Mr A who might forget to inform Registry that Mr B now had the file. Mr C might now need the file and Registry tells him that Mr A has it. Mr C seeks the file from Mr A who tells him that he has given it to Mr B. But Mr B might have passed it to Mr D without informing either Mr A or the Registry. If the file had not been consulted for some time, none of the people who had used it might be able to recall to whom they had given it and it was truly lost. I spent at least one-third of my time in the Department looking for mislaid files.
I learned from my new-found colleagues that the Principal Officer who headed the General Section was a fearsome woman called Miss M. Miss M was away when I arrived but I was introduced to her on her return. She had the disconcerting appearance of a little girl who had withered without turning into a woman. She was in her fifties and spoke in a voice made husky by her chain-smoking. She smoked cigarettes through a long holder which I associated with Hollywood vamps of the 1930s. The holders contained filters which she hoped would diminish the damage to her lungs. She had no concern for the effect of her smoking on others, and barely stopped short of blowing smoke in their faces. The day after her return, she barked down the phone at me to bring her a certain file. Happily, I found the file quickly in one of the piles on the floor and brought it to her. She took it without looking at or thanking me and opened it. ‘It’s not in date order,’ she growled. ‘Put it in date order and bring it back.’ The file contained a fat bundle of papers which I had to remove from the string by which they were attached and rethread them in date order. The next time Miss M ordered me to fetch a file I frantically re-arranged the papers in date order before taking it in to her. ‘I asked you for that file over an hour ago’ she barked. ‘But you told me that I must never bring a file that was not in date order,’ I replied. ‘Well do it faster the next time,’ she snarled.
The Minister for Posts and Telegraphs when I worked in the Department was Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien. Cruise O’Brien had been elected for the Labour Party in 1973 and the party had formed a coalition with Fine Gael. He had little interest in the administration of Ireland’s Posts and Telegraphs system and his main political pre-occupations were promoting the cause of Northern unionists and excoriating nationalists, particularly Charles Haughey, who represented the same constituency as he did. When Cruise O’Brien became Minister, sixty per cent of people in Ireland could receive BBC channels but the other forty per cent were deprived of the aesthetic delights of Coronation Street and The Benny Hill Show and were demanding that the government organise the rebroadcast of the BBC channels. Cruise O’Brien favoured rebroadcasting BBC, thinking that viewing BBC news and current affairs might cause Southern nationalists to abandon their desire for a united Ireland. The government instead decided to allow RTÉ to set up a second channel. RTÉ2 met the demand for Coronation Street by rebroadcasting it and also provided such elevating entertainments as The Streets of San Francisco and The Duchess of Duke Street.
Cruise O’Brien adopted an air of Olympian detachment in dealing with civil servants. It was suspected that he did not always read the memos which he signed ‘Agreed. CCOB’. I was required to take notes at meetings he had with delegations lobbying for the rebroadcast of BBC. I frantically noted down everything that was said and wrote up my report, which was edited by Ms M. If I wrote that ‘the Minister agreed’ this was changed to ‘the Minister agreed to consider’. I discovered that the minutes should show not what the Minister said but what the civil servants considered he ought to have said.
One of my duties was to compile material for answers to Parliamentary Questions or ‘PQs’. I would write a comprehensive account of whatever issue was being asked about and Ms M would reduce this to a single paragraph or sometimes a single sentence. I discovered that the art of answering the PQs was to give as little information as possible in the reply but to have a great deal of additional information which the Minister could give out if the TD who had put down the question persisted in asking ‘supplementary’ questions.
At the apex of the hierarchy in the Department was the Secretary. Mr O’C, and beneath him were two Assistant Secretaries, Mr O’S and Mr O’D. I first encountered the Secretary when taking notes at a meeting over which he presided. I was disconcerted to see that he appeared to have one eye fixed on me while the other eye roamed around the table. I later discovered that the eye apparently fixed on me was artificial. The Assistant Secretary who was responsible for the area in which I worked, Mr O’S, was pernickety and pusillanimous. He lived in terror of having to make a decision and when faced with any issue on which a decision was unavoidable, his immediate response was ‘What did we do before?’ Sometimes discovering what was done before required me to seek a file from the Dead Files Section. The dead files were files no longer in current use and were kept in cabinets covered with decades of dust and presided over by ghostly men in brown dustcoats who seemed never to have been exposed to daylight.
Files and documents were circulated in the Department by messengers who wheeled them around on trolleys. During my second week in the Department, I was surprised when a messenger deposited a file on my desk. Opening it, I found a note, which said ‘Mr Byrne. For your obs.’ I learned that ‘obs’ was an abbreviation of ‘observations’. I cannot recall what the issue was on which I was required to make observations but I certainly knew nothing about it. On asking Mr L, the Higher Executive Officer, what I should write he said ‘Just write something non-committal and pass it on’. I learned that the process of seeking ‘obs’ was intended to spread blame as widely as possible should something go wrong with a decision. The official making the questioned decision could say ‘But I sought observations from Sections A, B, C and D and none of them objected.’
The only photocopier to which I had access was located in an office occupied by a man and a woman who between them were manic depressive, as the man was depressed and the woman manic. When I came to use the photocopier, the woman, Miss L, would jump up from her desk and excitedly ask me questions about goings on in the General Section. ‘Did Miss M get her hair done? Did Mr B fall off his bicycle? Was Mr L turned down for promotion?’ Mr H never spoke to me and seemed sunk in unshakeable torpor. One day when Miss L was absent, Mr H startled me by suddenly saying ‘I sometimes think I am spiritually proud.’ I could not think of a response to this remark but Mr H did not expect one as he gabbled out an account of how he had been a Discalced Carmelite friar. The term ‘Discalced’ he told me came from the Latin for shoeless. When St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila founded a more austere branch of Carmelites, the nuns and friars had been barefoot but when Mr H was a friar, sandals were permitted. Mr H had a crisis of faith based on his doubts about the Doctrine of the Trinity and Sanctifying Grace, which having not experienced it, he feared did not exist. Mr H expressed his doubts to his ‘Superior’, who told him that there could be no place in the Carmelites for a priest who entertained doubts on fixed dogma. Despite having left the priesthood twenty years earlier, Mr H was obsessed with theological questions, on which he ruminated constantly while clipping articles from newspapers which referred to the Department of Posts and Telegraphs.
At around 11 each morning most of the officials in the General Section repaired to a canteen for a tea/coffee break. The canteen appeared to be unchanged from the rebuilding of the GPO after the Easter Rising. Barely drinkable tea and coffee were served from tarnished urns and the only pastries were appropriately named ‘rock buns’ dotted with charred currants, and so hard that they could dislodge tooth fillings. There were mousetraps placed around the wainscots, often with the previous night’s catch still in them. Conversation at coffee break consisted mainly of complaining about work and strategies to avoid it. I once heard a clerical assistant complain ‘I’m down to my sick days’ meaning she had exhausted her annual leave and would have to pretend to be sick to take further days off. From tea break conversations I learned that some of my colleagues, when presented with a new task, would either argue that the task need not be done or, if it must be done, it should be done by another section. I knew of some civil servants who used this strategy successfully enough to rise to ‘middle management’ until after thirty years of obstructive idleness they were dismissed, on substantial pensions, when powers of dismissal were given to the Secretaries of Departments in 2006. (Before that time, ‘established’ civil servants could only be dismissed by a decision of the government.)
I often had to take documents to be typed in a typing pool which consisted of about ten young women, presided over by Miss S, who read Mills and Boon romances between checking the work of the typists. The work of some of the typists had to be re-done because they had made guesses at illegible words in the handwritten documents given to them. They clattered away on ancient manual typewriters, on one of which Padraig Pearse probably typed his note of surrender. The typewriters frequently jammed, and one typist hit ‘o’ so hard that she perforated the paper. There were electric typewriters in the Minister’s office and the office of the Secretary but they were reserved for ‘Minister’s correspondence’.
A laughable pretence was maintained that the Irish language was, or could be, used in the business of the Department. The senior officials signed documents with the Irish versions of their names and one of the Assistant Secretaries, who used an antiquated Irish spelling of his surname, was unaffectionately known as Mr O Shagadagga. I discovered that I was the only person in the section who knew the first national language when a letter in Irish relating to Radio na Gaeltachta had to be replied to, causing Mr O Shagadagga almost to hyperventilate with anxiety. He was astounded when I drafted a reply in Irish.
After a year working in the Department, my suitability for permanent appointment was evaluated. I recall that among the criteria on which I was assessed, was my willingness to do boring tasks without displaying frustration. Apparently, I was deemed satisfactory on this measure and though my handwriting was rated as ‘legible with difficulty’ I was ‘established’ or made permanent. This was a cause for celebration among my colleagues who treated me to muddy coffee and a rock bun in the rodent-infested canteen. They were aghast when I told them that, as I could no longer tolerate Miss Kneeveeahkawn’s snarling and Mr O Shagadagga’s bleating, I was abandoning my post as an ‘established’ civil servant for a one-year junior research fellowship.
22/7/2024
