Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 19:

In page 12, to delete lines 30 to 35.

I propose to delete the first four members of the advisory council. We must have independence of thought and action. People within the broad bureaucracy seem to act in union. That was a feature of the banking crisis, where they called those who disagreed with them the contrarians and marginalised them. That kind of consensus can be extremely dangerous. Let us take the first member of the advisory council, the director general of the EPA. The advisory council may wish to make reflections, good, bad or indifferent, about the EPA. Sustainable Energy Ireland may also have widely differing views about energy policy, given we regularly have widely differing views on the issue in this House and some of the most stimulating debates we have are on various energy factors. In both of those cases, why do the insiders get automatic seats on the advisory council? The situation is more serious with regard to Teagasc, which is an agricultural development agency charged with the task of promoting agriculture, which is a major source of pollution. Therefore, I think that body is compromised. The last body is the ESRI, on which the evidence Professor John FitzGerald gave to the banking inquiry illustrates my point. When the Department of Finance did not like what the ESRI was doing, somebody rang up and complained, and that person was code-named "Nervous Nellie".

The quangos in this case must be independent of the centre and there is no evidence that they are. They are subject to group-think. I would prefer to have genuinely independent people from bodies like the Royal Irish Academy and the environmental science departments in the universities, and not have four positions reserved for people from the bureaucracy. We may have to correct the bureaucracy to solve the problems of climate change. We need to bring in the international expertise of the scientific community and not have it confined to those who are already public sector insiders, some of whom may have conflicts of interest and some of whom are already under the thumb of their parent Departments, and have a record of not thinking and certainly not speaking independently. That would be an extremely damaging precedent to set.