Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

I move amendment No. 23:

In page 21, lines 26 to 28, to delete all words from and including "shall," in line 26 down to and including "Oireachtas" in line 28 and substitute the following:

"shall lay a strategic plan which has been approved by him or her under subsection (1) before the Houses of the Oireachtas, to debate the contents and to vote upon its implementation".

In keeping with previous debates on Report Stage, this amendment is an attempt to engage the Dáil in the general, but not specific, workings of the organisations referred to in this Bill. It would help in terms of engagement and greater public knowledge of the work these bodies carry out if there was general debate on the work programme of each of the bodies on a regular basis.

In an earlier reply, the Minister of State was reluctant to discuss specific reports and having such reports voted on in this Chamber. I fully accept that these are advisory reports to the Government, but they help to inform general political debate. For example, NESC is a body that produces concepts that are generally not discussed in normal political debate as they are ideas that carry a political consequence. This body first raised the prospect, still unrealised within our fiscal system, of the possibility and effectiveness of taxes on energy and property. For various political reasons, political parties in this House would evade these ideas during normal discourse.

If the strategic plan referred to in the Bill was to be laid before the House and subject to a regular debate, the plan would build upon the previous experience of bodies such as NESC, NESF and the National Centre for Partnership and Performance. It would detail how it intends to build on such work in future.

This is particularly important with regard to NESC. Every five years or so this body produces a major report or strategic document. When I was a member of NESC, it was entitled Opportunities, Challenges and Capacities for Choice. The body has recently released a similar document. These are major documents that inform the partnership process and the talks to secure future partnership agreements. We should, in line with the previous amendment tabled by Deputy Bruton, debate regularly in the House what these organisations intend to do and how they intend to do it. In the course of such a debate we should refer to the reports they have issued as part of their general workload. I hope the Minister looks on this amendment favourably, on the basis that the debate itself is important. I am open to suggestion on the second element of what I propose, namely, that a strategic plan be voted on in the House. I look forward to the Minister of State's response.

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