Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)

It gives me great pleasure to introduce the Public Appointments Transparency Bill 2009 to the House in my name and that of my Fine Gael colleagues. If passed by the Houses of the Oireachtas and enacted into law, it will bring about a radical reform in the way public bodies are governed and how they are held accountable to the representatives of people. In the past 12 years, there has been a massive proliferation in public bodies - agencies, boards, authorities, partnerships, commissions, regulators, quangos - whatever one wants to call them. They exist at national, regional and local level. Some bodies, such as the HSE and FÁS, control budgets of more than €1 billion. Many others such as Enterprise Ireland have budgets of more than €100 million. There are more than 1,000 bodies and they account for almost half of all government spending. This Bill specifically applies to State agencies with budgets of more than €1 million.

There are even sub-agencies of government agencies. Mr. Colm McCarthy claimed to have found "agencies hiding behind other agencies" or as Fine Gael described it in our Streamling Government paper, "sons of quangos". It still has not been possible for us to get a complete list of all Government bodies operating in the State. At local level, many public bodies may have several funding sources, receiving money from one Department under one heading and another Department under another heading. This is a corporate governance nightmare.

Many public bodies do very valuable work. For example, all of us will agree that FÁS does excellent work in running high quality apprenticeships and by providing supported employment in thousands of local communities through the community employment schemes. No one disputes that. Even the HSE, though much maligned, gets it right some of the time. The Personal Injuries Assessment Board has reduced the cost of insurance and IDA Ireland has brought foreign direct investment into the State. The ongoing revelations about waste, mismanagement and profligate spending at FÁS, however, have brought into sharp focus the need to do much more to hold to account public bodies. It is clear that the board of FÁS did not do its job. Board members were more concerned with representing their own sectoral interests than they were about ensuring the public interest and principles of good governance were served. The FÁS executives who are most responsible for the money wasted and the damage done to FÁS as an organisation still have not been held to account. The director general resigned but kept his pension and was given a golden handshake by the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance on his way out the door. Other FÁS executives also retired with their pensions and lump sum intact or still hold their positions.

Public bodies like FÁS and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority might well be the worst examples of the public sector gone wrong. They might be outliers, but they also might be the tip of the iceberg. Either way, the time has come to embark on a programme of deep and meaningful reform. This must involve three pillars. The first is to rationalise and reduce the number of public bodies. The second is to reform the structure of the boards so that appointments are vetted and scrutinised by the Oireachtas. The third pillar is to make sure that public bodies are fully accountable to the Oireachtas.

The Government has, at long last, begun the process of rationalising and reducing the number of State agencies and public bodies. This is welcome. Its programme, however, is limited and lacks ambition. Progress has been slow. Less than half of the decisions announced by the Minister for Finance during the emergency budget speech have been acted on. The Government is in the process of establishing a new quango, NAMA, and we have already seen mission creep set in with NAMA. Initially, it was supposed to be an asset management agency, but now we are talking about giving it additional roles in social housing and so on. The legislative programme contains proposals for new quangos including, for example, a new State agency to manage the Curragh of Kildare, but not the military aspects of it.

Moreover, the Government has yet to respond to the recommendations of the McCarthy report with regard to further rationalisation. In our published policy papers, Streamlining Government and Power to the People, Fine Gael has outlined a far-reaching plan to cull, merge and rationalise more than 70 public bodies at national level. We have also proposed bringing hundreds of local agencies, boards, committees and partnerships back under the remit of local government, where they belong. Fine Gael believes in local government. We want more local democracy with a wider remit and its own revenue raising powers. We stand in opposition to the approach of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, who have consistently sought to bypass local authorities and to denude them of their powers.

Ministers hold in their hands the power to appoint 6,000 people to positions on State boards. Many of the people appointed to State boards are people of quality and calibre and they deserve our thanks. Some are associated with a particular political party. I have no problem with this. People should be rewarded for participating in the political process and it would be wrong to place a cordon sanitaire around them to exclude them. Of course, they must be qualified for the job. Political affiliation should not be considered a qualification in itself, nor should the fact that one is a friend of the Taoiseach, as a former Taoiseach told us. These 6,000 appointments are made in secret, without the involvement of the Oireachtas. The Public Appointment Transparency Bill 2009 will change this.

The Bill requires that the names and qualifications of appointees to the boards of public bodies must be laid before the Dáil. This will ensure that appointees are suitably qualified and that anyone nominated to the chair of a State board must first appear before the relevant Oireachtas committee, which will have the power to hold up the appointment if it is inappropriate. This vetting process will enable members to question the new chairperson about his or her qualifications, experience and plans for the job. This process is common in many other democracies, most notably, the US. Furthermore, I propose that committees be restricted to asking questions that are relevant to the position, to avoid the prurient trawl of the personal lives of nominees which occurs in the US Senate. We do not want that to happen here.

The Bill enabling the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland contains one measure to allow Oireachtas committees to have some input into appointing half the members of that authority. This is a welcome departure, but it is not enough. It is only one agency out of 1,000, it represents only half the positions, and expecting a committee to come up with names is much more complex than asking the Minister to do so and leaving it to the committee to vet them.

The Public Appointments Transparency Bill 2009 also requires that all members of State boards should be given a letter of appointment clearly stating their responsibilities. It is extraordinary that people can be still appointed to positions of responsibility without being given clear terms of reference. To quote a well known RTE television programme, "Don't learn the rules and you can't be accused."

The Public Appointments Transparency Bill 2009 also improves the capacity of the Oireachtas and its committees to hold State agencies to account on a regular basis. It gives committees the power to summon chairpersons of State boards to give evidence and requires that they appear before Oireachtas committees to present their annual report and annual accounts. The Bill provides for real powers of scrutiny, the kind currently exercised only by the Public Accounts Committee. It gives our parliamentary committees teeth and allows us to do the job the public expects us to do, but which has not been done in the past 12 years.

The economic crisis should cause us all to question the old certainties and long-held beliefs. I firmly believe that if our political process and Parliament had functioned more effectively in the past we would not face today a deficit so large, a banking system so broken or a public sector so difficult to reform. We should use this crisis as an opportunity to change the way politics and public administration function. We should use it to restore public confidence in Parliament, in politics and in Government. We should bring about a democratic revolution involving fundamental reforms to the way the Dáil and Seanad work and are elected, the way political parties are funded, the way local government raises its revenue and exercises its powers, and the way public officials are held account. The Public Appointment Transparency Bill 2009 forms just one part of that democratic revolution and I commend it to the House.

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