Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

I move amendment No. 9:

In page 9, to delete lines 20 to 30.

A substantial part of this Bill aims to amend the Harbours Act 1996 to enable a Minister effectively to remove democratically elected councillors from the boards of harbour companies and ports and to nominate instead a single member from local government. It will also give him the power to reduce the number of worker directors to one and to reduce or remove one of the key elements of the 1996 Act. Labour Party councillors who served on ports and harbour boards did so with great distinction. The Minister's action is predicated on the fact that the boards are too large and that we must now have eight person boards. The kind of widespread local democratic representation that we have had over the years is no longer fit for purpose. I argued the point on Second Stage that many effective boards have more than eight members. I am not sure what the ideal number of board members would be; the Government has 15 people and there are many other instances of very effective bodies and boards of organisations where there may be ten, 12 or 15 members. They seem to work best.

On Committee Stage the Minister indicated that one of the reasons he had to reduce the number of board members was because too many companies had more board members than workers. Dublin Port has 155 employees and 650 pensioners; Cork has 121 employees and 159 pensioners; Shannon Foynes has 60 employees; Waterford and Dún Laoghaire have 50 employees; Galway has 15 employees; and New Ross and Drogheda have 14 employees. These are significant companies by any standards and the normal kind of company governance should apply.

There are many famous ports which are fairly close to us in this part of the world. For example, Belfast has 15 board members, four of whom are councillors; Antwerp has 18 board members, ten of whom are councillors; Singapore has a board of 12 members; and the great port of Hamburg has a board of 22, including two worker directors. The more we look at international comparisons, the less clear the Minister's case becomes. Overall, the case of removing the right of local authorities to nominate their members as they have selected on to harbour and port boards has not been made by the Minister.

There is always the fear that political patronage will become an avenue whereby a Minister in power will be able to nominate members of his own party, and it may be possible that a person being a chairman of a comhairle ceantair, branch of a political party or a constituency party could be a requirement for discharging the office of director in a port company. That would be a bad and ludicrous position, which we should avoid at all costs.

One can consider the very impressive contribution to port companies of local government city and county councillors over recent decades and particularly since 1996. The Minister's action seems to be a retrograde step. At the start of this debate we asked to recommit this Bill because the Minister indicated he might have considered avenues whereby the local council would have been able to nominate preferred representatives on to the boards in question. The Minister indicated he could do this by regulation but there is no amendment to the Bill to this effect.

There have been various reviews of the ports back to 2000, with the Packer report being the first to indicate that boards should be smaller. If one considers effective commercial activity from ports and other companies, smaller port board size is not necessarily the best way forward. The suspicion continues that decimating the representation of councillors and worker directors on the boards of ports is being done at times to facilitate the Government in permitting ports to move in a way that would be out of the public interest, or where their aims and ambitions would be more removed from the public interest. In the past there were big agendas regarding the privatisation of ports, and that would fall into the same kind of category.

Worker directors have made an overwhelmingly positive contribution to the development of commercial State ports since the Harbours Act 1996 was implemented. Worker directors by their nature tend to be people with a profound knowledge of their own port and a deep interest in its work. Given that worker directors have been some of the most supportive in developing the commercial remit of ports outside their immediate area, it seems to be a retrograde move to cut the size of their contribution to large ports. Worker directors must go through the democratic process and are elected by colleagues, unlike the rest of the ministerial nominations to boards.

These three amendments seek to prevent the Minister from changing the 1996 Act and removing direct democracy from the boards of these large and important local companies by reducing the number of worker directors. In general terms, this would create a very small and elite board around the chief executive. The Minister has not made the case, either on Second or Committee Stage, that this will necessarily end up in much more effective governance.

Ultimately, in our political world, would we be better off with a Government of seven or eight people? Some might say that we would be and in the current Administration, a number of people would not make that seven or eight. Most people feel a slightly larger group would be better. With my own long experience of boards in different areas of the social economy, sport and other sectors, I believe that a board with eight members would be too small and could prevent wider representation and expertise that would enable the organisation to move forward in a better way.

I appreciate the Minister considers that in order for ports to have a commercial remit, we must have tighter governance and administration. We have had complaints about certain actions taken by ports in the past. I agree with the spirit of adopting that approach but losing local councillors and halving the number of worker directors would be a retrograde step. As a result, I am proposing these three amendments on behalf of the Labour Party.

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