Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I agree with everything my colleague, Deputy Bruton, said in this debate and I will try to avoid repeating some of his comments, although I may be tempted to stray into some of the issues he raised. I also found Deputy Burton's contribution to be especially interesting. She is correct in the context of one or two Departments in which it appears that Ministers of State will be tripping over each other to find relevant work. However, I do not wish to be churlish because I regard it a great honour to be re-elected to this House, so I wish all those appointed as Ministers of State well and hope they will find relevant work. However, the track record for Ministers of State has tended to be that five or six have real jobs while the remainder have notional duties.

It was not that long ago when legislation provided for only ten Ministers of State, a figure since increased to 15, 17 and now the 20 provided for in this Bill. According to my theory on the matter, there are two reasons for the increase in the numbers of Ministers of State. The first is the simple political reality of senior Ministers who retain their positions in Government, Fianna Fáil Members on the backbenches for too long, and Fianna Fáil Taoisigh feeling the need to keep Members under some degree of control and preserve a certain level of personal happiness while also ensuring they retain their sanity. The only means of achieving those aims is by increasing the prospects for Deputies of being appointed Minister of State. With each new intake of Deputies, the number of Ministers of State has increased in an environment of limited reshuffling of Ministers.

The problem is a fundamental one. I was interested to hear Deputy Mansergh's comments as a new Member of this House. He raised a matter of importance which is missing from the manner by which the Dáil operates when he referred to the fact that simply being a Member of Parliament offers a meaningful and important role and should allow a meaningful contribution to the legislative process. That is the nub of the problem because, if we leave aside the need to appoint Ministers and some Ministers of State to ensure a functioning Government and the political reasons for appointing extras who have no serious jobs to perform, the second reason for such appointments is because this Parliament requires root and branch reform.

It is interesting to return here after an absence of five years and discover that no meaningful reforms have been made to parliamentary procedures. The committees which were created by the previous Dáil have had a limited impact on the workings of Government and the provision of policy. The real difficulty for Deputies who want to do work other than simple constituency services while also ensuring their re-election is that non-ministerial Members perform no meaningful legislative function of any nature whatsoever. The present Government, which has been in office for the past ten years and could have its remit extended a further five years, has done everything it can to ensure Deputies on the backbenches of the Government and the Opposition sides of the House play as meaningless a legislative role as possible. I say that as someone who has published 25 Private Member's Bills and was fortunate enough to manage, in circumstances where governments had limited majorities, to pass four of them. The remaining 19 Bills, while ultimately defeated by the Government, resulted in very similar Government legislation within two to three years.

There is a need to reform the way this House operates and this Government has a unique opportunity to do so. Perhaps if this House operated differently and if Members who are not members of Government were allowed to play a real legislative role, there would not be a need for us to continue to grow what are largely meaningless positions of Ministers of State, to give people titles so they feel better about what they are doing, while giving them no meaningful functions at all.

I wish to highlight an issue I discovered through research I carried out in the few weeks since the general election. I have discovered the extraordinary statistic that in the 29th Dáil, a total of 70 Private Member's Bills were published, all of them by Opposition Deputies. Indeed, the Leas Ceann Comhairle himself published some of those Bills. In any normal parliament, given the broad range of issues with which those Bills dealt, a reasonable number over a five-year period would have been enacted. The Bills covered a broad range of issues, some of which were of great importance but were not given priority by the Government. Many of them dealt with issues that should not have embarrassed the Minister of the day.

The Government should have welcomed constructive proposals coming from the Opposition side. Instead, the Government has a knee-jerk, negative reaction to Private Member's Bills published. Ministers feel that, rather than being worthy measures that should be encouraged, they in some way diminish the stature of the Minister and undermine his or her legislative potency in the eyes of the public. Of the 70 Private Member's Bills published, only one was enacted. That was a Bill published by Deputy Rabbitte, making an important but minor amendment to the coroners legislation. The Coroners (Amendment) Bill 2005 was eventually enacted in December 2005. A total of 70 Private Member's Bills were published but only one was enacted.

The way this Parliament operates is fundamentally wrong. This Government should, in the context of retaining and preserving the sanity of its own backbenchers and allowing this House to play a meaningful role, make a policy decision that it welcomes constructive legislation published by Members from all sides of the House. If legislation is published by a Fianna Fáil backbencher, it should not been seen as treachery and an attempt to embarrass the Minister. If legislation is published by an Opposition Deputy, the merits of that legislation should be considered. It should not simply be allowed a first reading and then either squashed on Second Stage or put into a vacuum in a committee that never progresses it. Specific time should be made available in this House to allow Private Member's legislation a degree of priority to progress various issues.

We must ensure on Committee Stages, particularly in committees, that Ministers welcome constructive amendments proposed by Opposition Deputies and do not always perceive them as being a political trap. We should no longer go through the charade of voting down amendments from the Opposition, only for the Minister, on Report Stage, to produce an identical amendment in order to say the legislation is his or hers and the Opposition played no hand or part in it.

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