Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I totally exclude myself. I am thinking more of boards and the like. In the seven or eight I know of — I am talking about ones in the past that are gone and finished — I think in all cases they were totally innocent of anything that was said about them. That would have happened across the party political system. Obviously for something that is very major and is very clear-cut, then there is a case. However, in most of these things there is not. I have seen things involving people in business and people involved in allegations that were made about people. They invariably tend to be wrong and are wrong. I am not big into that, in fairness to the people involved.

More important, it is good that we are now seeing more representative bodies and groups in legislation. I repeat what I have said here a number of times on Question Time. In recent years the capacity of the Executive to get the right people to be on the main 20 boards and to give of the necessary time to corporate governance and other issues is increasingly difficult. I want to thank all those who give that time commitment. In the modern world it is not maybe as it was 25 years ago where people might have attended a board meeting once a month. Increasingly these boards have sub-committees, audit committees or corporate governance committees where people are asked to give a large number of hours. Deputy Kenny knows as well as I do that many of these people never even draw down what are the relatively small amounts that are given to them — they do not bother with them. So it has nothing to do with that. Sometimes they do it for the prestige although I am not sure there is much prestige anymore. I think people just do it in the interests of public service and we appreciate that.

The idea of involving the committees is something that some of my colleagues are going to have a go at.

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