Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I wish to deal with this measure under a number of headings, namely, the history of the saga which goes back to the early 1970s, the hand-over between the former Minister, Deputy Martin, and the Tánaiste, the first Bill which was deemed unconstitutional and the one we are now discussing and the prospects for administration. It is important to state at the outset that if anybody wanted to do a PhD on public administration in the Irish governmental system over the past two decades which span the administration of different political combinations, this would be a wonderful test case to examine. I have some experience of it from my time in Government.

The complexity of the issue and the structure which presides in health as distinct from local government is a major contributing factor to all of this. It is also important to state that nothing wrong was done. What was done was illegal but it was not wrong. I do not believe anybody has challenged the fact that somebody with a non-contributory pension getting full-time care should make a contribution from that pension to his or her upkeep since he or she is in care 24 hours per day, seven days per week. What was wrong about it was that it did not have statutory underpinning.

A former leader of my party was the first Minister to introduce the system or to give it his accord. On numerous occasions, things have been done in good faith, were deemed to be correct and were politically sanctioned but did not have the necessary legal statutory authority for them to be implemented. This is one example. I understand from the contribution of my colleague, Deputy McManus, that the only person who really spotted the problem was the late John Boland who had an eagle eye and a sharp tongue. In the short two month interregnum after the Labour Party left Government in 1987 when the election was inevitably coming, he clearly saw this legal lacuna and that the gap would have to be properly underpinned by some type of statutory measure. It was on the table for the incoming Fianna Fáil Minister for Health, the Ceann Comhairle, Deputy O'Hanlon, but for reasons we do not know and probably never will, unless the freedom of information legislation or the 30-year rule reveal otherwise, it was not high on the agenda of that slash-and-burn Government. I do not believe the Minister of State, Deputy Power, supported the head of it at the time but those were different days.

We fast forward then to the view of the chief executive of the former Southern Health Board who raised a possible problem. He got the legal opinion which brings us up to the eventful day — 16 December — in the Gresham Hotel. That takes us to the modern history and the hand-over.

I wish to focus on a test case of how bad this Administration is and how utterly incompetent it is as a collective entity. Although the Minister of State, Deputy Power, has been sent into the House, as Deputy Kenny said, his hands are clean. He was a million miles away from the scene of the so-called cock-up. The Labour Party and Fianna Fáil introduced the system of programme managers and special advisers to ensure the political corpus of a Minister could be in three places at the one time. It was also to ensure civil servants could have political direction that knocked heads between different Departments, safe in the knowledge their loyalty to their own Department was in no way compromised by their need to accept a political compromise authorised by a programme manager with the clear authority that would come in due course from the Minister. It was a very good system, it worked extremely well during my experience with Fianna Fáil and it was about governance rather than publicity. It was about fast-tracking decisions and avoiding cock-ups and mistakes. Frequently Ciaran O'Meara or Greg Sparks would have addressed me, Ministers from Fine Gael, the rainbow coalition or Fianna Fáil as follows, using language that no civil servant could ever employ: "For Christ sake, Minister, if you don't get your act together on this matter, the party will be in serious trouble". Self-evidently, civil servants cannot adopt that language, nor should they. They can draw attention diplomatically to what, in the words of Sir Humphrey, might be a very brave decision to make. However, they cannot be as brutally frank as a programme manager needs to be and should be. It is hard to be such.

I say advisedly, from my vantage point of limited knowledge, that programme managers and special advisers were more concerned with the image of the former Minister for Health and Children than the content of his head. If he did not have time to read the documentation discussed in and around the meeting of 16 December, he could have consulted the two advisers who were paid to read it to look out for landmines and problems. One of them, the Minister of State, Deputy Tim O'Malley, did so. However, he is not of the same party and he is very inexperienced in political terms, although he may be a wise man in many other respects. He did not deal with the issue. The former Minister of State, Deputy Callely, says he spoke to the Taoiseach and was to talk to the then Minister about the issue, but there is no record of this. Ultimately, at a meeting of the committee that subsequently inquired into this matter, the former Minister denied all knowledge of it. However, the former Secretary General of the Department said he did brief him. We know what happened thereafter. The current Minister, Deputy Harney, took over the job. She knew everything about everything, and still does, and introduced a Bill that was struck down because it was not unconstitutional.

To return to my suggested theme for a PhD, let me put in context the difficulty the Department of Health and Children faced at the time and which it faces now. Given that the current Minister of State, Deputy Seán Power, was previously a member of a county council, he may accept the analogy I will draw. There is never a problem like the one in question in the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government over what is being spent in Kildare County Council in light of what the Custom House knows. The legal and administrative structures and the political traditions, dating from the commencement of the County Management Acts, ensured that the Custom House had, at all times, a very good handle on what was happening. It had a local accounts auditor supervising and finding out relevant information. More important, at the local level the administrative staff from the county manager down, under the scrutiny of the councillors — I am primarily talking about management rather than politics — had a dominant but not a domineering relationship to the technical staff, be they engineers or architects. The same cannot be said for the structure in the health system. The Department of Health and Children, which was not housed in an elegant Gandon building like the Custom House but in what is probably the worst building in the city, and certainly one of the most unhealthy, had a semi-detached relationship with the local health boards and various health agencies. This relationship was not of its making because of the historical way in which the health services increasingly came within the public domain.

From calculating Estimates while in the Department of Finance, I know that, of all Departments, the Department of Health fared worst because it could not get a hard handle on figures. It did not receive the figures and there were so-called demand-led schemes. I produced three budgets in the Department of Finance and at all times got the impression that the Department of Health was dealing with estimates of figures based on estimates coming from estimates. It was always difficult. Additionally, the management history of the Department of Health and Children is probably one of the worst, with the exception of the management histories of the Departments of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and Agriculture and Food. Can one think of any other Department in which a senior civil servant took the Secretary General to court on the grounds that a promise of promotion had been reneged upon after a serious performance by that person in respect of a health scandal? The Department of Health and Children, through no choice or fault of its own, went from crisis to crisis owing to agencies for which it was ultimately responsible.

It is against this background that we should examine this Administration and, in considering this Bill, determine whether lessons can be learned and applied. I am not in the business of attributing blame and asking people to take responsibility — the electorate will ultimately make this choice. However, if one is trying to manage what is perhaps the most complex and expensive Department in terms of its budgetary allocation, and perhaps the most difficult because of the dominance of health professionals in the system, as opposed to the position of environmentalist professionals in the local government system, who represent the technical side rather than the administrative side, and who come into the Department from a smoothly run Department such as the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, the smartest thing is not to fire the general who is in charge.

Consider the circumstances that would obtain if any one of us elected politicians worked in an organisation that was constantly in the front line, dealing with agencies that were not telling the truth and in some cases telling lies, and had a Secretary General with a reputation among his peers for commitment and professionalism, which I certainly noted. The former Minister for Health and Children, who had responsibility, paid advisers to read the briefs and two Ministers of State who knew there was a landmine ready to blow up, claimed he knew nothing about the matter in question, yet, to protect the security of this coalition Government, the current Minister, Deputy Harney, instead of demanding the head of the former Minister, fired Michael Kelly. When she could not fire him properly he was promoted to a higher-paid job.

Some day somebody will write this story in its entirety. The political group in this Chamber, charged with a very professional Civil Service, will not come out of it well. If collective responsibility means anything, it must be noted that the current occupants of these benches have reneged on the mandate and responsibility the citizens of this Republic give to us. This is why there is a lesson to be learned from this saga.

The issue does not just extend this far. The Minister of State, Deputy Seán Power, had no direct responsibility in the matter. Where do we stand now? We, on this side of the House, are supposed to scrutinise legislation and it is our task to hold it to account. Nobody has a monopoly on truth and no drafter of legislation can see around all the corners all the time. When the first Bill to address the overpayment issue was introduced by the current Minister for Health and Children, my colleague Deputy McManus said it was probably unfounded and unconstitutional. However, the Minister, who knows everything and who was to transform the health service with a magic wand, refused to accept this criticism. On foot of the culture she engendered by effectively politically sacking the Secretary General of the Department of Health and Children within a week of entering office, what other senior civil servant will have the nerve to try to tell her something? Would the Minister of State or anybody else do so? What kind of climate of terror and intimidation was created among a group of individuals who did not know the hell what was going on in most of the hospitals because they were told lies, but who were politically accountable therefor nevertheless? I do not refer to high-speed senior management expertise but to common decency and respect for citizens who, because of the political vow of neutrality they make to ensure a non-corrupt Civil Service, for which we are eternally indebted, are defenceless when treated in the manner I have described.

The first Bill was found unconstitutional and contrary to the advice of this House. It was introduced because the current Administration knows everything. If the Minister for Health and Children does not, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform certainly does. They have an obsession with private sector magic wands that will cure every ill in the country. I know Fianna Fáil does not believe in these because they are patent nonsense, but it must go along with the Progressive Democrats because it needs their votes.

If one passes through Dublin Airport this summer, one will recall the insistence of the Progressive Democrats that Aer Rianta be broken up and that the new terminals should compete against each other. Nowhere else in the world is there such a nonsense in terms of infrastructure provision but, because of that ideological stand-off and since the tail is wagging a very big populist dog, millions of passengers will be put through hell in the airport as a consequence.

We have the same nonsense in the method of administration by hiring a private company to do something for which no private company has the expertise in this country. There is no expertise in the private sector to administer payments of this kind retrospectively, yet in the public sector three such organisations exist. The Revenue Commissioners do this kind of work all the time and have fantastic expertise. They run the public service payroll. If we did not want to use them to do it, we could use the Department of Social and Family Affairs, which is also on the payroll. It has a body of expertise and entrepreneurial skill, and has the wisdom of experience having learnt from mistakes made in the past. Why was it not possible to get a task force of the best administrators from the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Social and Family Affairs and perhaps the National Treasury Management Agency to deal with the problem and when the problem was dealt with, the group could have been stood down and the individuals could have returned to their sections?

This in effect is what a Department is: a semi-permanent task force set up to address a particular problem, staffed by professional full-time civil servants with the assistance of external consultants where needs be. The Department of Supplies during the Second World War, the Department of the Gaeltacht, the Department of Labour and the Department of Equality and Law Reform were all established for specific tasks and when that set of tasks was completed, the Department was stood down and the civil servants moved to other Departments.

There is no need to waste citizens' money of the order of €50 million for administration. If that figure is not accurate, perhaps the Minister of State could correct me. The company that gets the contract will interview people from the Department of Health and Children, the Department of Social and Family Affairs and the Revenue Commissioners. Nobody will get a fee for this. The company will pick the brains of officials and will write a report based on the knowledge taken from staff employed by the State. It will then charge the Government a fortune to tell it what these people are paid to tell it professionally if it had the courage to listen to them in the first instance.

There is a lesson in this sad saga. It is about arrogance and incompetence combined with a sense that the Government knows it all and that nobody can tell it anything. When that point of incompetent arrogance is reached, the emergency panic button that is the key to a successful democracy kicks in. The real value of a democracy, as the people of Nepal are struggling to discover, is not the right to elect a government but the right to fire one. It is not the right to choose the government of people's liking, but the right to get rid of the government that has become incompetent, incapable, blind and deaf. While I know, admire and like many Government Deputies individually, sadly, collectively, like a team, their performance is worse than that of Leinster last Sunday.

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