Dinny McGinley (Donegal South West, Fine Gael)

Most of it was already committed to these communities and very little additional money has been channelled through RAPID. It appears that through this legislation the Government is attempting to pull a second quick stroke on disadvantaged communities.

The legislation attempts to undermine the process of ensuring that the moneys contained in the dormant accounts fund are allocated to communities on the ground in a manner which is beyond question and above suspicion. The enabling legislation which led to the creation of the Dormant Accounts Fund Disbursements Board sought to create a safe, secure and foolproof system. The board was established in June 2002 and since then it has presided over numerous allocations of funding to worthy community groups, initiatives and projects that so desperately needed support. The Minister has argued that the board cannot cope with its workload. He commented last year that the changes were proposed only when the Government realised how much money the fund would contain. What point was the Minister making? Is it that he and his colleagues suddenly became interested in the money once they realised how much was involved and the potential it offered them to buy votes? He will rattle off comments about the board being incapable of handling such large amounts of money or other dubious reasons such as an inadequate amount of staff. This is an attempt by the Government to conceal its own greed. Government members are licking their lips in anticipation of having a slush fund of hundreds of millions of euro at their disposal in the run-up to the next election.

The time is long overdue to debunk these ridiculous myths and half-truths by this greedy Government. When one examines the alleged inability of the board to distribute the moneys, there is no evidence to substantiate the Minister's ludicrous claim.

The Minister of State, Deputy Noel Ahern, has also claimed that the board is spending too much on administrative costs and would save money if the functions were to be carried out by existing public servants. This does not bear up to scrutiny. Public servants can be transferred from one Department or another to assist the board.

The existing board is well fit and qualified to decide when and how this money should be distributed. In the space of a year, the board successfully and with apparent ease distributed more than €40 million in dormant funds. I am not aware of any problems, allegations of misconduct or lack of transparency by anyone in regard to these allocations. Some €40 million in the space of a year is no small sum and yet the Minister of State appears to want to sully the good name and create doubts about the ability of the board.

The Minister of State is a member of a Government which itself wasted more than €50 million on the now defunct electronic voting proposals and tens of millions of euro on the vainglorious "Bertie Bowl" and is therefore certainly in no position to give accountancy lessons to anyone. I do not need to remind the House of the most recent injustice and act of greed carried out by this Government when it knowingly robbed elderly people in public nursing homes. The Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Deputy Ó Cuív should not lecture this House about poor accounting.

The second myth which is spread by this Government to smooth its transition to a position where it can enrich its own political agenda at the expense of others is the falsehood that the Dormant Accounts Fund Disbursements Board lacks sufficient staff. There has never been any difficulty in transferring public servants from the sponsoring Department when any new public body or structure has been put in place in recent times. This is standard reason trotted out by the Minister but it is one which does not hold water. There is no reason additional administrative staff cannot be allocated to the board to allow it to deal with its workload.

It is also worth remembering that the board has engaged Area Development Management Limited to administer the initial round of funding on its behalf. ADM is a non-profit making organisation which has wide experience in managing programmes targeted at countering disadvantage and exclusion such as the rural transport initiative and the RAPID and PEACE II programmes. It is evident that the picture painted by the Minister of a dormant accounts fund board which is adrift, out of its depth and struggling to cope could not be further from the truth. It is nothing more than another desperate attempt by this Government to create a smokescreen and distort the facts.

The most fundamental element of this legislation lies in the provision which relates to who will decide where dormant fund moneys are allocated and to whom. This legislation will change from the current position whereby the Dormant Accounts Fund Disbursements Board takes such decisions, subject to the passive approval of the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. This legislation will mean that the Government will now take such decisions, with the money going to each Minister and their Department for his or her ultimate discretion to decide what project will receive grace from the Government and will get this vital funding lifeline.

At this stage, I cannot see how even this will work. The image which comes to mind is one of a Government charged with the task of collectively deciding what moneys go where, but with each Minister pressing for support for his or her own pet project. It is difficult to see how any decisions will be made about this money and even more difficult not to envisage open disputes and rivalries among Cabinet Ministers on who gets what. These tensions are likely to get worse as Ministers, in a bid to retain their seats in a general election year, jockey with one another to get money for their areas. It is laughable that the Minister should suggest that this legislation will put a better system in place. The question is better for whom? It is certainly not the disadvantaged or those who need this money.

If the Minister's utterances on this significant change are anything to go by, he himself cannot even defend the logic of the decision. Perhaps he is under pressure from his Cabinet colleagues to ensure that they get their hands on the pie too. In early 2004, when this Bill was first published, the Minister defended its rationale on the basis that the money involved was simply too much for the board to handle. Despite this, in only a few short weeks, after doubting the ability of the board to handle such large funds, the Minister appeared to contradict himself completely. By announcing that he was empowering the board to double the amount of money it allocated in 2004, from €30 million to €60 million, the Minister had contradicted himself. There appears to be no logic in his public utterances. He is seeking to limit the power of the board on the one hand and, on the other, expand the amount of money it distributes. It does not make sense. The Minister does not appear to believe what he is saying himself. One can only conclude that he is under pressure from his Cabinet colleagues to put in place arrangements to allow them to get their hands on the dormant funds.

The moneys contained in the dormant accounts fund must be beyond question, transparent and fairly and equitably distributed. The Government is on the record as supporting such a need for transparency in the distribution of the dormant funds. When the legislation to establish the existing structures passed through this House in November 2001, the then Minister for Finance, former Deputy McCreevy, reiterated the need for transparency. He said:

To get away from the problem of having the Government blamed as having a slush fund, it has been decided to establish a board of trustees. This board will distribute the money, subject to guidelines and without the direction from the Government. This will get away from the problems of having Ministers accused of favouring pet projects ... that the best approach was to give the power to distribute it to a disbursals board and not to the Minister. It was a decision I took and I think that it is the safest one in the circumstances.

This was the Minister for Finance who was responsible for introducing the first Dormant Accounts Bill. The Minister for Finance was clear in his support that the money should be distributed "without the direction from the Government". That was the position in 2001 when the Bill was introduced and this Bill fundamentally changes that philosophy and the money will now be at the disposal of the Government. What has changed? I call on the Minister to explain to the House why he and his colleagues now propose to direct these funds to their pet projects. This is an unjustified and a dangerous U-turn. It smacks of cronyism of the highest level. The words of the former Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, are completely worthless.

The Government has lost its self-restraint. It is no longer even attempting to hide its desire to make decisions based on its own self-interest as a political party than as a Government serving the best interests of the public. The legislation before us today is little more than a shameful attempt by the Government to cover up the Fianna Fáil mentality of pursuing its own survival above all else. None of us could have better summed up this political philosophy better than the Taoiseach when he declared: "The code of ethics is for those of us who are in here to try to stay in here." I am sure the Minister of State remembers that quote too.

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