John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael)

Deputy Bruton has given an idea of my theme, namely, dealing with bad legislation, but always dealing with it after the fact or historically. All Governments have been obliged to deal with this issue over the last 20 or 30 years and it has come to light more frequently recently, particularly because of the Comptroller and Auditor General's reports. In many cases, while a Minister might bring a proposal to the Cabinet, no financial assessments are performed on much legislation. Although this should happen it does not and in many cases this has cost tens and hundreds of millions of euro in waste.

My favourite example is the Official Languages Act. A council official threw a memorandum across my desk and asked how could the cost of translating every communication into Irish be paid for. He had a point, which goes to the core of the problem, which is that the House passes legislation, signs regulatory measures and budget measures are rammed through. However, no second-guessing is carried out on the Estimates put forward by Departments. In many cases, that is a big mistake and costs much money.

When one compares our system to those in other countries, it comes as no surprise that we end up with tenfold overruns. In some cases, officials in Departments have no clue as to what a particular measure will cost when it is introduced in the House. They figure it out as they go along. In other countries, the cost of such measures is second-guessed.

This was the reason for the Committee of Public Accounts's trip to the United States and the committee has been considering this matter for some time. The delegation met bodies like the Congressional Budget Office, boutique lobbying associations like Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Congressional Committee on Government Reform and the Auditor General of the United States. In California, the delegation met the director of finance for the Governor, as well as the state comptroller, the state auditor and people like that. We found the model we were looking for in the California Legislative Analyst's Office, in that it had a system whereby in some cases it would strongly contradict the financial estimates of the Governor and the executive office. It worked very well. Their system has evolved over 60 years and while we would not copy it, after 14 or 15 meetings — as the delegation had — one gets the idea. It became clear to us that the Oireachtas needs a second entity that produces estimates on a purely non-political and bipartisan basis for all Members and parties. That was the essential idea behind our trip to the United States.

The committee will produce a report in the next three or four weeks, which will include a paper by Deputy Rabbitte. I am hopeful, although I am not holding my breath, the Government will look upon this constructively. I can make a good argument for Ministers to consider having an entity like that to help them with long-term planning within their Departments. If Ministers have a second Estimate, they could do so more constructively. In some of the meetings, people could not believe and were amazed that we had a parliamentary system lacking this feature. We found some models — one was a state auditor's office in California — where we were surprised to hear that on occasion, the legislature actually requested estimates from the state auditor's office. We were given a number of examples where this was done and the legislation subsequently folded immediately, because the person sponsoring it did not have a clue as to how much it was going to cost in the first place. That was a good lesson for us. If we look at this constructively and examine the cost to central and local Government of the legislation passed in the House in the last year or two, we will be getting somewhere as far as Government waste generally is concerned.

The only reservation I have about this kind of system for our style of government is that in a couple of cases, the auditors intervened in policy formulation and seriously contradicted the executive branches. That would not suit our style of Government and would cause elections every six months. However, one could at least begin to think of putting together a separate entity within the Oireachtas that would create simple estimates for some legislative proposals, particularly the budget measures that are passed every year.

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