The hir­ing freeze in the pub­lic ser­vice was a mea­sure to curb the re­al­lo­ca­tion of un­used funds in­to oth­er av­enues.

The freeze was one of the mea­sures an­nounced by Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert dur­ing the Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Mon­day.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said the de­ci­sion to im­ple­ment the freeze was based on the fact that mon­ey al­lo­cat­ed to fill va­can­cies were of­ten not used in that man­ner.

“Every year in the bud­get in every min­istry there is a whole stack of posts which are deemed va­cant mean­ing that there is no­body in that post but you make pro­vi­sions to fund it. And what the man­age­ment of the pub­lic ser­vice usu­al­ly does is to get that fund­ing for a va­cant post. But dur­ing the op­er­a­tions of gov­ern­ment busi­ness dur­ing the year, they hard­ly fill those posts,” he said.

In many cas­es, the Prime Min­is­ter said min­istries would take those funds and use it for oth­er projects, and in this bud­get, it was not fea­si­ble to in­crease the bud­get deficit for un­planned spend­ing.

“So it’s like a pool of mon­ey that dur­ing the year you change and do oth­er things. So all we said, since the va­cant post block is not large­ly used, take it out of the bud­get and then what it would do. It would re­move the ease of flex­i­bil­i­ty of putting one place in­to an­oth­er when it wasn’t prob­a­bly re­quired there” he said.

“So it will bring tighter and bet­ter man­age­ment in the sys­tem. And in any case, we don’t have the mon­ey to ap­por­tion, you know this is a case of ne­ces­si­ty be­ing the moth­er of that de­ci­sion. And if we had bud­get­ed for that it would re­flect it­self in a larg­er deficit on the bud­get.”

“ It is not an ex­pense that is a pri­or­i­ty and re­al­ly it is a line in the bud­get that would most like­ly not be utilised,” he said.

The Prime Min­is­ter, how­ev­er, said it would not af­fect the pos­si­ble hir­ing of con­tract work­ers where nec­es­sary to ful­fil cer­tain roles.

“It does not mean that from time to time as you re­quire a con­tract po­si­tion so as to deal with pub­lic busi­ness, con­tract po­si­tions are man­aged tight with­out a prob­lem. But these va­cant posts are pub­lic ser­vice po­si­tions which are on the es­tab­lish­ment,” he said.