Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour)

I hoped, when putting my notes together this evening, that the Minister would be in the Chamber for this debate. It is unfortunate he is not here given the debacle of his two earlier appointments to the PRTB and the similarity of the situation in which we now find ourselves.

The Minister of State is proposing this evening to introduce retrospective legislation. We are going down the dangerous route of believing something can be rectified by latterly introducing legislation to correct past mistakes. It beggars belief that the Minister, Ministers of State and their advisers and handlers never read the Act. That is what happened. It is what happened in respect of the appointment of the two councillors concerned. The difficulty in which we find ourselves arises out of their not having read the Act. The Act was fundamentally flawed in terms of the dispute resolution committee's term of office being three years while that of the PRTB was five years. The sequencing in this regard was always going to create difficulties. Hence, the difficulty we are now in.

A valuable opportunity is being missed this evening to rectify a whole series of anomalies that exist under the PRTB and the Residential Tenancies Act. The first issue relates to the licensing of landlords. A coach and four is being driven through the legislation by property owners who rent out their properties and exempt themselves from registering their properties with the PRTB. The opportunity to address this matter is being missed. More fundamentally, the PRTB is not required under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose information. Given that the Exchequer and ultimately the State is paying for the operation of this board, it is a nonsense that FOI does not apply. Also, it is nonsense that parliamentary questions to the Minister in regard to the operations of the PRTB are not deemed to be in order in this House. That is another issue which could be corrected here, this evening. When one writes to the Minister about the PRTB, he says it is a matter for it, yet when one writes to the PRTB, it informs Deputies to the effect that it can only conduct itself within the scope of specific legislation. That is complete nonsense.

The other opportunity that might have been dealt with this evening is the introduction of a deposit retention scheme. I hope to debate this later, on Committee Stage. This is a proposal that would save the State millions of euro every year. The PRTB could operate a deposit retention system, rather than the present situation, whereby landlords hold deposits. This takes up much of Threshold's time, as the advocating agency on behalf of tenants and gives rise to much of the conflict that the PRTB deals with. There would be two benefits from this. A neutral agency would hold the deposit, which could travel from one tenancy to another. More importantly, given the rental accommodation scheme being operated by the HSE, millions of euro are being held in deposits, which the State could either notionally have held with the PRTB or lodged into an account from which it could derive interest. That is another question I shall put to the Minister of State this evening, as something that would provide an income for the State while improving landlord-tenancy law in Ireland inordinately.

The Minister of State talks, in his response, about an audit being carried out last month. On 9 October, when this situation broke, with the appointment of two illegal appointees to the PRTB, I called for an audit from the Minister. I said at the time, "This cock-up opens up the possibility that the propriety of other appointments made by the Minister since taking office may also be questioned". I called for a full audit of all such appointments and a report to be placed before the Dáil.

If that audit had been carried out at the time, we would not now be in the difficult situation we are in. I also asked the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Gormley, four times during the course of the debate to explain how this information came before him, as regards those councillors. Again, I should like to ask the Minister of State this evening how this specific information came before him, because a number of matters are contained in the Bill, and it is important that the House knows how the information reached his desk.

I will summarise some aspects of the Bill, which contain a weakness. Where does section 159, in essence, the pillar we are debating today, now stand in the amended Bill? As regards the illegal appointments, if they are validated retrospectively and if members of the board have less than a year to run since their appointment, how will the sequencing be done in future? The board expires at the end of September 2009 for nine of the ten illegally appointed members and at the end of December 2009 for the tenth. There is a sequencing difficulty. When will these people actually be appointed? Are they being reappointed on foot of a new date, or is the Minister giving them a secondary position, whereby their appointment date is also being retrospectively looked at?

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