Bernard Allen (Cork North Central, Fine Gael)

I wish to refer to some of the issues raised by my colleague, Deputy O'Dowd, yesterday. What I have heard is a matter for the Committee of Public Accounts, which I chair, and we will deal with this matter further.

I want to make the House aware that, when my committee sought the report on Safe Pass courses in FÁS, FÁS provided us with a censored version of the Spollen report. Subsequently, it appeared unredacted in a Sunday newspaper. This reveals the anomaly posed by the Data Protection Act and the obstacles that the Committee of Public Accounts faces in getting to the truth of such matters. We were provided with reports that were censored because of alleged data protection provisions while the Freedom of Information Act rightly allowed the total disclosure of facts to everyone. The Spollen report is one example, but another report on safety issues does not seem to have seen the light of day, namely, the Claritas report, which was the subject of a question by my colleague, Deputy Stanton, in October 2008.

From what I have heard so far, I am amazed that the fraud squad has not been invited in to investigate this situation, given the seemingly serious anomalies in good governance and so on. My committee will consider this matter and deal with the limitations placed on us. Due to the Abbeylara Supreme Court case, we cannot pinpoint people who are at fault or issue reports that apportion blame. In our report on FÁS published in February 2009, we needed to couch our statements carefully and use phrases such as "the board should be reduced in number and reconstituted".

The Bill is a belated attempt to deal with some of the report's key recommendations. I will give it a reserved welcome because it implements one of my committee's recommendations, namely, to restructure and reconstitute the board to make it smaller. A new board to oversee the running of FÁS is needed, not only to restore confidence in an organisation that will play a vital role in helping to retrain approximately 400,000 unemployed people, but to change the culture of an organisation - it will have a major job in this regard - that has gone badly off the rails. The problems at FÁS date back many years and, thanks to the work of the Comptroller and Auditor General, a light has been shone on many practices that not only show a poor image of our senior public service, but also besmirch the good name of the 2,000 employees of FÁS who do a good job day in, day out in dealing with the issues confronting the organisation and our economy.

The Committee of Public Accounts will deal with many of the relevant issues that arise in the audit reports in the months ahead, such as weak controls, disregard for public procurement rules, wasteful expenditure on advertising and the allegation that the board was kept in the dark by an executive that had taken its eye off the ball and by poor oversight of FÁS, not only by the Departments of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Finance, but by the board of FÁS itself. By its make-up, the board was not capable of doing its job, namely, running an organisation that was entrusted with more than €1 billion of taxpayers' money every year, even in those years of full employment.

While the committee I chair will do its job, I am speaking today as a constituency and public representative. The committee will do its job in dealing with what happened in FÁS but what it cannot do is question Government policy and decisions and this goes to the root of what is wrong in FÁS. At a time of full employment in the State, FÁS was in receipt of money to do what it wanted and it had so much money it could spend its way out of any difficulty. It was advised to spend European Social Fund money to avoid losing it. That was the attitude.

The Science Challenge programme gave FÁS executives an excuse, along with a large crowd of hangers-on, including senior civil servants, Ministers and other friends including some journalists regarded as friendly, to enjoy the luxuries of first class travel to Florida. There was no value to the taxpayer from that programme. I have some regard for Science Foundation Ireland which pinpointed the uselessness of that project and in its evaluation said the programme did not have measurements to justify the expenditure. Much of the €8 million was spent on advertising. Having plenty of money also allowed FÁS to overspend by millions of euro on its advertising budget and much of the advertising was strategically placed and at times helped to mask the criticism and scrutiny that should have applied. The bottom line is that FÁS spent only what the Department allocated to it. The Department, whose Accounting Officer and Minister should have been keeping a close eye on the organisation, took their eye off the ball. Even in good times it is not appropriate to spend money for the sake of spending it and it is certainly not appropriate in these hard times.

Issues arise for public administration as a result of what was uncovered in FÁS. We need to examine the capability of all Departments and in particular the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, to ensure they do not allow the mistakes made in organisations such as FÁS, to recur. Officials from the Department of Finance regularly appear before the committee of which I am Chairman. I refer to a meeting of the committee last week dealing with procurement practices in the Irish Prison Service. The officials were questioned by the committee. I will paraphrase their reply and I will not be unfair to them. They stated they were waiting on the Committee of Public Accounts to come to its conclusions. In my view they should be proactive in dealing with issues such as bad procurement practices. There is still a lot to be desired in this situation.

The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment cannot wash its hands of the FÁS debacle. It is responsible through its Vote for allocating funds to FÁS and it must ensure that before one euro is spent on FÁS there are clear performance indicators and measurements in place to justify the allocation of moneys. These measurements must be specific and the Department must have the capability to carry out its oversight function. The Department must also enhance its policy-making role. It is clear that much of that role is now with the departmental agencies instead of resting with the Department.

While I welcome this Bill the Minister could have gone further. I hope the Bill will be amended on Committee Stage in order to strengthen its provisions. The Minister should follow the example shown by her colleague, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Eamon Ryan and give an Oireachtas committee a role in the appointment of the board of FÁS.

The Committee of Public Accounts recommended a commitment to gender equality on the board. It should comprise of men and women with good business experience, who value their public duty and who are capable of running one of the most important bodies in the State. I suggest there is a role for a workers' representative on the board rather than the token representatives of IBEC and the trade union movement. This person would represent the workers in FÁS who have an in-depth knowledge of the organisation and would be accessible to his or her colleagues in order to be alerted if the situation were going off the rails.

FÁS needs to move on while still being open to public scrutiny. Good leadership will enable the organisation to develop a plan to retrain the thousands of people who are unemployed as a result of the downturn in the economy. I wish the new director general well. School leavers and recent university graduates will also require further training to prepare them for entry into the workforce. The State will fail such people if this Bill is not right.

Recent reports of the Committee of Public Accounts and of the Comptroller and Auditor General describe a litany of waste in the HSE, in FÁS and in several other Departments and agencies. One report published earlier this year described public expenditure on the health services. I do not see much sign of any action being taken as a result of that report which pinpointed areas with potential for gross wastage of public moneys. I also have a concern about the new common contract for hospital consultants. The last common contract was a farce and a millstone around the neck of the taxpayer. There was widespread abuse of it by individuals and no monitoring of its provisions. I am concerned that there is inadequate monitoring of the new contract with regard to the ratio of public and private mix in public hospitals.

There is evidence that a two-tier system exists. Public hospitals operate a fast-track approach for those who can pay. This is one area that needs to be scrutinised. The Committee of Public Accounts will be doing so within the next few weeks and will be asking questions. The new contract has cost the taxpayer a fair amount and the committee will inquire whether its provisions are being strictly applied.

FÁS spent €620,000 on a television advertisement that was never seen on a single television set. Another €600,000 was lost on what was termed "nugatory expenditure". The word "nugatory" is new to me. It means no services were supplied for the expenditure. This is the subject of Garda investigation and steps are being taken to deal with that issue. Another €140,000 was spent on an advertising campaign for which most of the slots had a zero target market audience. It seems many people were asleep at the wheel in a number of agencies and in the Departments of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Finance in particular.

When it came to giving an example to State agencies, this Government showed them how to spend money. I refer to a total of €55 million for the failed e-voting system. The luxury travel in the US afforded to Ministers by FÁS was a factor in the light-touch supervision applied to the State employment and training agency. Why was the board of FÁS not fired following the publication of the report last February? We all but said the board should have been fired. However, a culture in Government led to an over-spending which should not have been incurred by Ministers and Departments and this extended to those high up in some State bodies. Do Ministers and senior officials in State agencies realise how difficult it is for those who are losing their jobs or struggling to survive on social welfare payments to tolerate this appalling extravagance? It cannot be easy for those in employment to see their pay packets shrinking as the Ministers and their cohorts swan around like modern day princes, to paraphrase a Fianna Fáil backbencher.

This Bill is long overdue. I believed that action would have been taken by the Tánaiste before the summer recess once the recommendations of the Committee of Public Accounts were published last February and as a result of the serious nature of the report. I expected action on the implementation of some of the key recommendations. The Bill lacks a true reforming element. The responses to date have been inadequate in that they deal with the board and with some regulations regarding senior FÁS staff. We all know, however, that the problems of the agency go far beyond the board and that there are systematic failures in the organisation. These failures will be the subject of a further investigation by the Comptroller and Auditor General. This is serious in view of the fact that we have so many people unemployed.

Along with overhauling the FÁS organisation, the Government must now initiate public sector reform proposals where managers should be made accountable for the projects and budgets for which they are responsible. Success should be rewarded but failure in dealing with taxpayers' money has to be dealt with too. The whole culture must change from the top in FÁS, out of respect for the thousands of people suffering at present.

I suspect the contents of this legislation will politicise the FÁS board more than ever before and I am not confident that it represents anything other than the continuation of the culture of cronyism that has been so evident in the past 12 years. The Government should introduce reforms by setting up a transparent public appointments system which would put ministerial appointees to appointed State boards before an Oireachtas committee to discuss the experience and qualifications that make them suitable for such responsible positions. There should also be legislation that would allow for the dismissal of senior managers who have not been vigilant in the protection of public finances. I recognise the Bill would allow the Minister to dismiss board members who are not adequately performing or where the removal of the board member is necessary for the effective performance by FÁS of its functions. However, there is no provision for the dismissal of FÁS executives who are most responsible for the FÁS scandals and who have, to date, mainly escaped and in some cases have even been rewarded.

At the most recent hearing of the Committee of Public Accounts, we demanded the documentation from the Department of Finance, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and FÁS related to the Molloy deal, which we have now received. This development has been referred to in the House and in some newspapers. Along with these papers, I am conscious of the review being carried out by the Tánaiste into the retirement package given to the former director general of FÁS and I have asked, on behalf of the committee, for the report of that review in advance of dealing further with issues related to the Molloy package. We have received an indication from the Secretary General of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment that it could be some time before that report is available and finalised, because we have been told it must wait until the publication of the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, which I find strange.

The Committee of Public Accounts has also decided that, in advance of future hearings, it will require further information and, therefore, has written to Mr. Saul regarding his recent comments that the board had not been informed by the executive of FÁS on issues. The committee has afforded Mr. Saul an opportunity to give a report to the committee on this matter. We have been in contact with the former director of corporate services to afford him the opportunity to give evidence to the committee or submit a report. We have also asked FÁS for details of the internal audit investigation, comprising 23 modules, into procurement in the corporate affairs division.

The issues that have arisen in FÁS throw up two issues of broader concern and I have written to the Minister for Finance, on behalf of the committee, regarding these. I also wish to put them on the record of the House. The terms of the package available to outgoing chief executives of State bodies as set down in the Department of Finance guidelines, which allow generous top-ups to be given to those whose contracts are being terminated, are not specific enough. We have also written regarding the application of provisions regarding the disclosure of information by a board member to the relevant Minister. This is part of section 8 of this Bill, but that measure should apply to all State boards.

I refer to the package available to outgoing chief executives of State bodies. I am concerned that the former director general of FÁS was not the only person to benefit from a generous package and I question, for example, the retirement package given to the former Financial Regulator. Given the culture in place and the likelihood of future gilt-edged packages being made available, I call on the Minister for Finance to review these arrangements and issue new guidelines. This is the unanimous view of the Committee of Public Accounts. We are also of the view that ministerial representatives on State boards are either not performing or may be prevented from performing an effective role as the eyes and ears of the Minister and, therefore, the provision contained in section 8 of the new Bill on FÁS should have broader application to all State boards.

See this speech in context