Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

In July 2008 the Minister for Finance stated that it was decided that legal counsels to the Tribunal would no longer be paid once public hearings were completed. The Government told the Departments to which the tribunals report that tribunal legal teams, including a senior counsel at €2,700 per day, should be let go. That did not happen in the Moriarty tribunal. Does the Taoiseach have a figure for how much has been paid out since last July toward a tribunal which has sat only a handful of times? On 14 July 208 The Irish Times reported that the Minister for Finance had told the Departments to whom tribunals reported that once the public hearings were over, legal staff associated with it should no longer be paid.

The recent Comptroller and Auditor General's report on tribunals made no specific recommendation on the Moriarty tribunal However the report made it clear that the implementation of the Government's legal costs working group's recommendations to establish a legal costs regulatory body could help combat the escalation of legal costs and promote regulation and a structure in which future estimation could be carried out. Arising from that, why did the Government not establish a structure or agency to manage legal costs, given all of what is involved here?

Does the Taoiseach have an opinion, as Taoiseach, on the tribunals which have been established to do specific work? Does he see a situation where we should have a future referendum to ask the people to restore the position whereby Members of the Oireachtas, whoever they might be, would be entitled to carry out investigative or examination work? This happened with the DIRT inquiry and to some extent with the Abbeylara inquiry. While people might be very cynical about politics and politicians, those two inquiries did a remarkable job at very little cost to the taxpayer and, in the case of the DIRT inquiry, brought a sizeable return to the Exchequer. With all the public comment about costs associated with tribunals, perhaps the Taoiseach might reflect on the matter.

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