Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I want to discuss corporate governance in State bodies and what we know about its successes and failures. There was an attempt from the early 1950s to create structures with the involvement of employers, trade unions and workers that would lead to the further development and education of workers. FÁS as we know it, for good or bad, developed in an extraordinary way during the period of the Celtic tiger when a great deal of money was available to the organisation but there was little unemployment and it farmed out a lot of the training of apprentices. Essentially it was an organisation that had a social partnership structure but that had in many respects lost its way. When one adds the statements of the former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern, that he appointed people to boards because they were his friends, the stage was set for undermining public faith in the quality of the participants on the boards of practically every State body and organisation. That must be considered and is one of the principal dangers in this Bill.

I support the reduction in numbers of members of the board but I am not sure that it goes far enough. I do not know that FÁS needs 11 board members. If FÁS continues its involvement in education, training, back to work schemes and skills development, the people appointed to the board must have appropriate expertise. We do not want ideological warriors of the left or the right on the board. We want people who can do the job and who, most of all, are willing to ask questions and to persist with those questions until they get an appropriate answer. The Minister has made a grave error in holding to herself alone the power to appoint the members of the board.

No matter what merit these people have, whether they have any political party connection or none, the Minister will be seen to continue this principle of Fianna-Fáil dominated appointments with, at the moment, a nod to the odd Green. This is fatally undermining not just of the politics of Fianna Fáil which will become hateful to people, of which I am sure the Minister is aware, but of all politics. The Opposition parties afforded her an opportunity to set up for the first time a monitoring structure which would question the panel of appointees about their qualification for and approach to the job which is fundamental to democratic reforms and appointing a good, competent board.

A person with whom I used to work wrote to me recently. He was a long-serving member of a number of State boards under different Governments and in his time had affiliations to many different political parties. He described his association on a board during Mr. Haughey's time when he asked some questions that were not to the taste of the management of the State body. These were deemed to be either inappropriate or annoying in some way, or, perhaps for pig-iron, the management simply did not wish to answer the questions of this board member who became, therefore, an annoyance. If there is a person on a board who becomes isolated as a result of asking questions which are not answered reasonably, he or she then becomes what the Green Party calls the "squeaky wheel", that annoying person who pops up at board meetings to ask the awkward question. Very quickly that person becomes isolated and the others on the board join ranks with the management of the enterprise to put him or her in a box. All of us who work in politics are very familiar with this.

Let us remember that what we want from a board is corporate governance. We had a recent example in the Houses that I deeply regret. The much esteemed and admirable Mr. Tom O'Higgins, an accountant with a national and international reputation, who was the chairman of the Dáil audit committee, clearly had a point of view and a communications issue with regard to the governance of Deputies and the expenses regime which was governed by the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission. A person who is put on a board has a legitimate right to ask questions. Clearly, in the case of Mr. O'Higgins, he became frustrated to the point of resignation. If that is happening within the purview of State institutions, boards or bodies, the State must sit up and take notice and try to change the structure of corporate governance.

Reading about the members of the FÁS board, I can say honestly that I suspect many members of the board were genuinely shocked and horrified by the material that has emerged. I have seen statements to this effect. One must take a step back and ask why there were not detailed board discussions to examine in a real way the nuts and bolts of what FÁS did. One then must ask, and it is a legitimate question, why it was, given the various audit personnel involved whether internal or from the Comptroller and Auditor General, that some of this material or these facts did not emerge. Why did they have to come as a result of whistleblowing? We have not had an answer to that. Are there mechanisms in the Comptroller and Auditor General's office that need to be overhauled and reviewed? At present, we know there are 22 internal audit inquiries, of which I understand ten to 12 have been completed. Whatever the Minister does, it is really important that those inquiries are completed in full, using an effective mechanism, which I understand to be under way through the internal audit sub-committee board of FÁS. The Minister should give a very clear commitment to that.

Ultimately, this is about people being appointed to State boards in this country. If one tapped the average person on the street on the shoulder and told him or her to become a member of this or that board, he or she would have to have training and receive some upskilling. Even if one was a brain surgeon, a chartered accountant or an eminent banker, if one went into an organisation like FÁS, which is complex, has a very large budget and does a great variety of different things, one would have to get some training, refreshment or briefing to become a competent member of the board. There would have to be discussion on what one's role as a board member was to be. One would have to approach it in a tough frame of mind, because one would be there to represent citizens and taxpayers and make the organisation achieve its duties to citizens, unemployed people and apprentices, and do so in a reasonably cost-effective manner from the point of view of the taxpayer. To be honest, after that everything else is frills.

What we are not getting from some of the people who served on boards in this country is public communication that the boards are operating to the required standard. We must be mindful also that the reputational damage to Ireland in this area, in banking and in a number of other areas is such that people are losing confidence in our institutions. I believe one of the reasons for this is the extraordinary regime of the former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern. Nothing would kill FÁS stone dead sooner than the culture of crony appointments to a crony board. That would become what a FÁS or public board represented in people's minds. We need a lot of thought as to how governance should be restored.

The Dublin Docklands Development Authority is another example. It was a fantastic idea to regenerate the docklands area but, again, this was another board on which, apparently, there were high levels of cronyism during the height of the Celtic tiger era. At that time some very bad property investment decisions were taken by that board and by the bank with which it had a particularly close association through directors and other mechanisms.

These examples of failures of public governance are very important to every political party. Those who are in government and have been there for too long, and those on the Opposition side who hope to be in government-----

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