Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Labour)

I strongly support Deputy Mitchell's amendment. This long-running issue has been raised with many Ministers in the last couple of Dáileanna. I remind the Minister, Deputy Dempsey, that he will not always be sitting on the Government side. When he is on this side of the House again at some point in the future, he will realise how difficult it is to operate under the new arrangement which makes the work of Opposition Members — I refer to spokespersons, in particular — difficult. The principle of democratic accountability seems to have been thrown out the window by the Government. As the Ombudsman pointed out recently, more and more agencies of one kind or another have been established in recent years. Responsibility for the delivery of services has been offloaded onto these bodies which could be called quangos. When legislation is introduced to establish such bodies and Members on this side of the House try to ensure some level of accountability is provided for, such proposals are rejected by the Minister of the day.

It is nonsensical and insulting to suggest other mechanisms are available to Deputies who want to hold the various bodies to account. In theory, an important organisation like the National Roads Authority is accountable to an Oireachtas committee and its officials can be asked to attend a meeting of the committee to account for what it is doing. In practice, as the Minister knows, many of the people in question are requested to attend a meeting once every six months, at most. Most agencies do not send representatives to Oireachtas committees once a year. There is no way in which Opposition Members can on an ongoing basis establish the accountability required.

This is not just a question of accountability; it is also a question of information, which is more important in some ways. If Deputies on this side of the House do not have access to information on public services, it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to do our parliamentary work properly. When I was doing some work recently on waiting lists for driving tests, I assumed that it was a matter for the Minister of the day to tackle the issue. The Minister should be accountable in that respect. Almost a year ago the then Minister, Deputy Cullen, announced an initiative that was aimed at reducing waiting lists. Members on this side of the House have no way of knowing whether that initiative was successful. Do we have a right to access that information? How can we get it? When responsibility for this matter lay squarely with the relevant Minister, he or she used to give us information on waiting lists on a quarterly basis. When I tried to get such information approximately six months ago, the then Minister told me it was no longer his responsibility but a matter for the Road Safety Authority. I wrote to the RSA and it took a number of months to get that information. That is not acceptable. We cannot do our job properly unless the Minister is prepared to accept that responsibility. If he will not answer questions he must ensure there is a system in place whereby each of those State agencies give timely responses to Members of the Dáil if they request information. That is the very least the Minister should do. I ask him to put in place a system with all the agencies that come under his responsibility to ensure they respond. In umpteen cases I have tried to contact a senior person in one of those agencies but the people concerned do not even return telephone calls. We cannot do our business like that.

If we were not getting an adequate response from a Department or the Minister in the past there was always the option of putting down a parliamentary question and we were guaranteed that information within three days, but that is no longer the case. I do not know if the Minister realises that the situation is so bad. He has been on the opposite side of the House for so long I do not believe he realises the difficulties faced by people on this side. We must go through a long rigmarole of writing to the chief executive of the agency involved and we might or might not get a reply. I have resorted to putting in a freedom of information request — I will not name the agency — because I could not get basic information that previously I would have been able to get by way of parliamentary question.

I ask the Minister to take this issue on board because there is such a proliferation of agencies under the remit of the Department of Transport and the Marine it makes it extremely difficult to get information. I noted what the Tánaiste and Members on this side of the House said earlier on the Order of Business, namely, that this issue must be taken up by the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, but I ask that the Minister at least put in place a system whereby we can follow good practice and ensure we have reasonably easy access to basic information to which we should be entitled.

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