Tending the Public Garden - Accountable for today, Stewarding for tomorrow - Remarks by Deputy Governor Colm Kincaid to the DPER Management Conference

Good morning everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you here today in Croke Park – a place that embodies what can be achieved in Ireland.

As the children return to school and the rain settles in, Ireland’s extraordinary summer has finally begun to turn. And it really was extraordinary – the driest on record and certainly the hottest of my lifetime.

Anyone who tends to a garden will have enjoyed the growth and the long evenings but will also have felt the strain. The limitations on water use accentuated the need to decide what to protect and at times, what to cut.

This, I think, is a useful metaphor for public service leadership. A garden needs daily attention, but it cannot be understood one day at a time, and sometimes it must brave extreme events. Gardens have immediate needs, annual cycles and often outlast the people who tend to them. Certain parts of the garden need to be managed differently, and stewardship means responding to today’s conditions while maintaining the capacity for the whole garden to flourish over time.

The institutions we lead face the same challenges. We operate through changing priorities, annual budgets and extreme events. We are also custodians of capabilities that take years to build.

We are responsible and accountable for delivering today, as well as stewarding for tomorrow.

Strategy versus Strategic plans

Building the workplace of the future therefore requires strategy – not merely a strategic plan.

I make that distinction deliberately – and not to minimise the importance of planning!

A strategy should express a view of the world, define the outcomes that matter and make choices about where the organisation will concentrate its attention and capability. It should explain how those choices reinforce one another. It should be clear enough to guide decisions when circumstances change, as they invariably will.

A strategic plan on the other hand sets out a catalogue of intended activity. It assigns actions to owners and provides milestones, budgets and timelines. It is an implementation roadmap for the overall strategy.

This matters particularly in public service. We work within statutory mandates, and under democratic accountability. Strategy represents the bridge between a durable public purpose and changing democratic direction. It allows new priorities to be translated into action without requiring the institutional foundations to be rebuilt every time.

Annual business planning and budgeting is essential. It imposes discipline, and forces prioritisation and alignment. But a one-year plan and budget cannot, by itself, tell us which capabilities must be cultivated over five or ten years.

At the Central Bank, our Strategy¹ is grounded in a mission that does not change from year to year: to serve the public interest by maintaining monetary and financial stability while ensuring that the financial system operates in the best interests of consumers and the wider economy.

Our vision is similarly clear: One Bank – trusted by the public, respected by our peers and a fulfilling workplace for our people.

From that purpose, in 2021, we set out a five-year strategy with four connected themes: being future focussed; being open and engaged, transforming how we work; and safeguarding the system and the public interest.

The word “connected” matters. We cannot safeguard effectively unless we are future focussed. We cannot transform effectively unless we listen and engage.

Beneath that strategic direction sit annual and multi-year plans and budgets, outcome indicators and performance reporting. Those disciplines act as a bridge to support practical delivery of the strategy. But they are not substitutes for it. And the real leadership test is this: what must remain our constant and predominant aim year-on-year, even as this year’s plan changes?

This means identifying the capabilities our institutions will need under several plausible futures. This requires foresight and horizon scanning. It also requires disciplined choices about what garden features require our specific attention and effort at a given point in time, for everything to sustain over time. It requires us to be responsive to events but always with longer term stewardship in mind.

Looking beyond the current horizon

These considerations are particularly live for us in the Central Bank. We took stock of our strategy in 2024 and extended its coverage to 2027. As we look beyond this horizon, we are not trying to predict one future and write a plan for it. We are examining what different futures could demand of us, and what capabilities would leave us better prepared across a range of such scenarios.

We see rapid technological change, geopolitical tensions, global financial interconnectedness, sophisticated financial crime, the increased economic impact from climate and environmental risks, and pressure on trust in public institutions. None of those forces is waiting politely for the next planning cycle.

This morning I want to reflect on four dimensions of our future workplaces: digitalisation; longer and more diverse working lives; lifelong learning and artificial intelligence; and hybrid and flexible work. Their implications will differ across the public service. But they increasingly belong to all of us.

Digitalisation

Digitalisation is sometimes discussed as if it were principally an IT programme: a new portal, a new system or the automation of an existing process.

It is all of that of course. But it is also a lot more, from changing the nature of commercial life to how we build and sustain relationships.  In fact, I see the deeper change as behavioural. Rapid digitalisation is changing how and where people encounter public institutions, how they form their expectations and what they regard as an acceptable level of service. We live in an environment where information is abundant, attention is scarce, and source confidence is low. Time is precious, and people seek out intuitive experiences.

Accuracy remains indispensable, but information that cannot be understood by its target audience (or simply does not reach them in the first place) has not informed effectively. And a digital landscape that works for the confident user while failing someone under stress, with a disability, or with limited digital access should prompt questions about the society such a landscape is promoting.

Digitalisation should be designed around the person being served rather than the institution providing the service. Success should be tested by whether people reach the right outcome, not merely by whether the system completes a transaction at a technical level. Where algorithms help to allocate, prioritise or communicate, we need to be able to explain results, detect unequal effects and provide meaningful human recourse.

In short, digitalisation should not make public service less human. Properly designed, it should free human attention for the moments in which judgment, empathy and explanation matter most.

Longer lives, longer careers and a changing society

The second consideration is who will work in our future organisations, and for how long. Last year, Governor Makhlouf spoke at the OECD about demographics, migration and technology.² He asked us to look beyond the conventional definition of the working-age population and to consider labour market participation beyond the ages of 60 and 65.

Not everybody can or should work longer. But Irish habits are changing. Between 2019 and 2025, labour force participation among 65-69 year olds in Ireland rose from 23 to 30 per cent, putting us close to the top for activity rates for older workers in Europe.

We should then consider the opportunities to make longer careers possible and fulfilling. Whilst different jobs take differing tolls on the human mind and body, new choices increasingly exist across the professional spectrum.

And as people become healthier and live longer, they are likely to want to be active for longer and for some of that activity to involve work.  Longer working lives will thus require work to be designed differently. People will need to renew their skills more often. They should be able to move from management into specialist work, and vice versa, or from a full-time role into a different pattern. Pension, performance, promotion and learning systems will all need to support a longer career arc rather than a model inherited from shorter working lives.

When we think about the macro picture – such as questions around how large the future labour force might be, and how many workers will there be relative to the number of non-workers, both young and older – migration is a key consideration. The euro-area labour force grew by more than 8 million people between 2021 and 2025. Almost half of that increase came from non-euro-area nationals. Ireland has relied on both rising participation and inward migration. The share of international migrants in Ireland’s population grew from just over one in twenty in 1995 to one in five by 2020. Of the half-million increase in the population in the five years to 2026, almost two-thirds was accounted for by net inward migration, based on CSO population and migration estimates.³ The statistics are similar if we confine ourselves to the working age population.

Migration can support growth, entrepreneurship, trade and the sustainability of public finances. It can ease labour shortages.

We need to recognise the skills of people from different national, cultural and professional backgrounds, include their perspectives and enable them to progress.

That brings me to diversity and inclusion.

There are geopolitical currents arguing that diversity and inclusion should move down the agenda. I am of the opposite view. In a more fragmented and polarised world, the ability to invite different perspectives, challenge the status quo, understand different and broader views and avoid groupthink becomes ever more important to improve the quality of our decisions and outcomes.

The Central Bank has returned to this point repeatedly and we have articulated our view that diversity and inclusion is critical to navigating uncertainty and that it strengthens and bolsters leadership.

At the Central Bank, this is not only something that we ask of the firms we regulate. We have to examine ourselves. We published our first gender pay gap analysis in 2018⁴, before statutory reporting ever applied. We continue to publish annually⁵, and we see transparency as a starting point for accountability, not a declaration of success.

We have a cross-functional Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, vibrant employee networks with active senior leadership sponsorship and mentoring and development programmes. These initiatives matter because they make lived experiences visible, create a sense of belonging and improve decision-making as it becomes more reflective of the society it serves.

Strategically then, it is not sufficient for the workforce to simply look different. Success is achieved when difference is embraced, is fundamental to the way we think, influences the discussion, the decisions, and how we deliver our mandate.

Lifelong learning

Longer careers bring us to the third area of focus: skills.

Many people entering work now may have three or more distinct careers over a much longer working life. That need not mean leaving an organisation three times. The employers that create credible internal transitions may retain talent, institutional memory and culture while allowing people to accumulate new skills, perspectives and experiences.

The OECD’s 2025 study of almost 57,000 central government employees across participating European countries found that learning and development was the strongest driver of employee engagement. Yet only half of respondents felt they were growing professionally, and only about a third felt that their organisation supported mobility for career building.⁶

Artificial Intelligence is accentuating the need to plug that gap.  Its capabilities, availability and use are moving rapidly. There are employees who are embracing the change and others who are more cautious.

We will need to leverage AI for data literacy, critical thinking, verification, service design, and cyber security. We will need people who can build AI tools, people who can navigate them, and leaders who can traverse this intersection in a way that enhances productivity responsibly. We will need to preserve the core human capabilities of context, empathy, judgement, that AI can support but should not own. Much of the recent AI task-based analysis that predicts widespread job replacement risks missing this point.  As the economist Luis Garicano puts it, many jobs are ‘messy jobs’ – that is, jobs that are a combination of tasks that cannot be easily separated from each other, or from the humans doing them.

We must act with positive cautiousness to avoid the strategic risk at both extremes. If adoption is too slow, public bodies may lose relevance, productivity and talent, while ungoverned shadow-use develops in any case. If adoption is too fast and uncontrolled, public trust will wane. People need to understand the decisions that affect them, and to believe those decisions are made with their interests in mind.

Hybrid working

Hybrid working has become a feature of our work, but we must be clear on why we have it, where it supports our work, where in-person contact is important and how we balance the trade-offs. We must also recognise that this seismic shift is not long in train and the long-term effects are unclear.

The benefits are plain to see, from less commuting to health benefits and quality of life. Flexibility can also help organisations recruit beyond narrow geographic boundaries and retain people through different stages of their lives. I also believe it is good for our public service mission to get out of our offices and spend some of our working time immersed in the day-to-day of the communities in which we live.

But presence in a physical workplace has value too – and increasingly so in a world where AI drives down the value of ‘clean’ cognitive tasks (think analysis of structured data). Graduates and new joiners learn about judgement, relationships, accountability and context precisely by observing experienced colleagues. They learn from what happens around the margins of meetings and from encounters with senior leaders on the office floor.

If these moments no longer happen by accident, we should be mindful to include them by design. We should also be careful not to link success and opportunity to proximity. Staff should continue to be assessed through outcomes rather than attendance.

At the Central Bank, we have adopted a model that permits the majority of our staff to work from home up to 50% of the time and we track individual-level on-site attendance.  Other public service bodies have adopted different models and it will take a number of years for us to fully understand the impact of any given approach.

Hybrid working has a net positive impact and represents an important aspect of our value proposition. But we must continue to be mindful of how it is operationalised and be ready to make changes to ensure the policy continues to support our effectiveness in delivering for the public we serve.

Joining the dots

These issues are easy to place in separate organisational boxes. But the key to developing future strategy lies in linking the connections between them. The garden does not flourish unless everything is properly managed together and over time.

At the Central Bank, we do not claim to have settled these issues. But, as part of the public sector community, I hope we are playing our part in illuminating them. Through our economic research on demographics, migration, working patterns and AI, we contribute with evidence. From our day-to-day work and engagement with other bodies, we contribute practical experience. We are always interested to engage with others to share our experience and to learn.

Conclusion

To conclude, and as we think about the Central Bank’s next Strategy beyond 2027, I find myself returning to a small number of themes.

We need clarity about the durable public purpose that guides us through changing priorities.

We need real choices that turn that purpose into a strategy rather than a list of worthy intentions.

We need to cultivate capabilities before they are required in a crisis.

We need diverse, inclusive and engaging workplaces where people can learn, contribute and belong through longer and less linear careers.

And we need to demonstrate the competence, honesty, transparency and reliability through which public trust can be deserved.

To tend a garden is to accept that some of the work will bear fruit after our own period of responsibility. That is the essence of stewardship.

There will be difficult choices about what to prune (and when), what needs most attention at a given point in time, and what can be allowed for now to grow freely and bloom. There will certainly be storms where all we can hope for is to preserve what we have as best we can.

But the task of public service leadership is, I suggest, to maintain the conditions in which the whole garden can sustain and flourish over time through all these seasons, cycles and shocks.

If we can do that, the workplace of the future will not be a destination that suddenly arrives. It will be something we cultivate, deliberately, and over time.

Thank you.

*My thanks to Eoin Sheanon, Ray Glennon, Reamonn Lydon, Paul Woods and Glenn Calverley for their help in preparing these remarks.