John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the deputation. I intend to come at this a little differently because the subject matter has been dealt with comprehensively by members. I will give the deputation my take on what has happened here, why we are in this room and how the position has evolved in recent months. Furthermore, I will ask some questions with regard to public pay policy.

There seems to be almost an attitude or truism that public pay policy is always correct, but it is not always correct. Mistakes can be made when public pay policy is formulated. I will be asking the HSE how it formulated public pay policy in this regard because I believe, as a result of the disorganisation of the HSE and its dereliction of responsibility when it came to the policing of this particular area, that as a consequence of the way public pay policy was formulated and the way the HSE dealt with the section 38 organisations, they were forced into doing it. I am not so sure whether there has been a debate with regard to appropriate levels of pay when it comes to the health sector organisations that receive public moneys.

Ms McGuinness has made clear the genesis of the entire relationship between section 38 organisations and indicated it did not really kick off until 2009 and that the contractual arrangements finished in 2010 or 2011. I believe the HSE knew very well what the levels of pay were for chief executives and senior staff in many of these organisations and did not do anything about it. In many cases the organisations resisted giving that information. They took the view that they were independent and, in some cases, they did not believe that imparting that information to the HSE was reasonable, and they were wrong. However, in many cases, even when financial statements were imparted by those organisations to the HSE, no analysis was ever done by the HSE. We have seen this again and again throughout the entire affair.

One question in particular needs to be asked and this is the element that has never got a scintilla of debate in recent months. Does paying someone very well in organisations that receive public funding eventually lead to savings or lesser amounts of public moneys being expended in the long run?

I believe we have arrived at this point artificially. I am not using the Central Remedial Clinic as the example. The CRC is a charitable organisation. When I asked Mr. Kiely about where his pension was funded from, this entire episode kicked off. However, there is another question at issue. Let us separate the fact that the CRC is a charitable organisation - we must be very careful about that element of it - from how chief executives are funded within the sector. There is another issue at stake to which the HSE must respond but in respect of which it has never responded. It is an issue that has never been debated and I believe it is a realistic issue that needs to be aired.

Everything has changed since the banking crisis. People's perception of those on high salaries has changed. There is almost a perception in this room that anyone who makes over €100,000 a year has questions to answer. They do not. In some cases benefits accrue from those on higher pay in an organisation because of their skill sets, experience or management ability. I am not so sure the Health Service Executive has taken that into account. I think it was railroaded into this public policy because it was embarrassed by the fact that it had not policed this area properly for many years. It should respond to this. I ask Mr. Goulding for his opinion.

Ireland is not the only country having this debate. One only has to search on Google to find that chief executive officers of organisations such as Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York make millions of dollars. Some individuals involved there make complaints because the fund-raising arm is very active and question whether people should be so highly paid, while ordinary individuals fund-raise. These are legitimate questions. I suspect, however, that we have moved in the other direction. It is not the case that public pay policy is always correct and one can make the case sometimes that people deserve to be very well paid if they bring long-term benefits to an organisation. That has been forgotten in this argument.