Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

The reason for reducing the number is not primarily about financial savings, although that is an issue. Rather, the reason is to improve the committee system. There are so many committees that it is not possible for them all to function well. In larger parliaments, there are usually sufficient non-officeholding parliamentarians with an expertise or specialist knowledge to support a larger committee structure. Our House of 166 Members does not have that resource. The legislative committees are usually carried by the Minister and two Opposition spokespersons. In addition, since chairmen are so disproportionately drawn from the Government side of the House, they usually emerge as another string to the Government's bow. When it suits, the chairman is a stand-in for the Minister. When it does not suit, he or she emerges as a media advocate of reform instead of the Opposition. The Opposition does the heavy lifting and the others sign in to decorate their curricula vitae.

Like the Leas-Cheann Comhairle, I remember not so many years ago when the introduction of a committee system in the House was regarded as being at the leading edge of parliamentary reform. Some of the committees have demonstrated the value and quality of the work done, but we do not need 23 of them because a House of this size cannot support so many. The capacity to confer powers on a particular committee to compel witnesses and to send for persons and papers would enable a smaller committee system to hold public bodies to account, as envisaged in the Fine Gael Bill. Recent developments in many public bodies have demonstrated the necessity for a functional, informed committee system with the powers required to hold senior executives to account.

In recent days, a Minister of State appeared on RTE and wondered aloud what all of the fuss was about with FÁS. Was everything in the public domain not uncovered by FÁS in the first place, he wondered. That is true, but what he did not say was that the report of the internal audit system within FÁS was suppressed by the people running FÁS. My good friend, Deputy Conor Lenihan, forgot to say that. Sometimes, he has a problem in fleshing out his sentences to convey the full truth of a situation. Television lights have that impact on him. The internal audit function uncovered the skullduggery occurring, but it was suppressed and, from what I have been told, vindictive action was taken against a small number of staff.

Therefore, I support the Bill's measures to bring more transparency to public appointments and to provide for public bodies to be properly held to account. I agree with Deputy Varadkar's comments when introducing the Bill, that one ought not be excluded from serving on a public body by virtue of one's political affiliation, but there ought to be criteria other than-----

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