Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

This is one of the rare occasions when we get the opportunity to ask pretty fundamental questions about ourselves and whether politics in Ireland is fit for purpose. It is a very important question at the moment, because so much change needs to be made in this country that politics alone can lead. It is a unique situation whereby getting ourselves out of the economic and social problems we have is down to leadership from within the public rather than the private sector. This will indicate the extent to which we can successfully transform the way we manage public utilities and public services and measure the extent to which we can solve our problems.

We need to look very hard at ourselves as part of this debate. As the Minister of State knows, I have tabled an amendment in the name of the Fine Gael Party asking that we should provide just enough money for nine months, during which period there would be a review of the extent to which we are delivering value effectively for the money we spend. The Minister of State will know that over the past five years the staffing levels within the Houses have increased by 43%. There are the same number of politicians, but the budget has increased by 65%, equivalent to €54 million.

Some €33 million of that increase comes from the increased administration cost of running the Houses. We are running a big business here, which is using up substantially more resources than it has traditionally done. That is not necessarily good or bad, but the question is whether we are managing our affairs in a way that would square up to best practice in a modern, effective parliament. Sadly, people watching this debate would not give the Oireachtas top marks for being an effective parliament. They might even wonder if politics can ever provide the sort of leadership to get us out of the problems we face. That is sad, but true.

We face much scepticism and cynicism about our operations, but we have brought a lot of these problems on ourselves. We have allowed much of the real power that should reside in this House to slip away in various ways. Unfortunately, however, we have discovered that in many cases the power that slipped away from us was abused. We have been caught napping in respect of our responsibilities. I am not picking out the current Government, but the Executive has to bear a lot of the responsibility for this. The Executive has been quite content to use a strong Whips' system and guillotines. It has also been content to use consultants and the protection of freedom of information legislation on those consultancies in order to remove from public scrutiny much of what any parliament ought to be doing as a routine exercise.

In the last Dáil it went to a ridiculous extent whereby virtually every Government backbencher was on the Executive's payroll in one shape or form, as a chair, vice-chair or convenor. That has been part of the problem because the Executive preferred not to be subject to scrutiny and wanted a dumbed-down Parliament. The courts have also clipped our wings and this is arising again now with the suggestion that we should investigate what happened in the banking system. Parliament has been curtailed by the courts, which decided that if the Oireachtas is conducting an investigation, we cannot make any adverse finding against an individual. In my view, our power has been usurped, although I have the protection of the House. The worthy judges on the Supreme Court have made a decision and we have been constrained as a result of it.

Another way in which we have been damaged as a parliament, and offer less value for money, is by the Government's lazy habit of setting up an agency for every problem. That has blind-sided the Dáil in many cases. We saw the establishment of the HSE and FÁS, which are bodies that cannot be held to proper scrutiny in the House. They are not answerable to the Dáil in any sense. We have now discovered that many of the 250 additional quangos that were set up by the Government over the last decade have vague mandates and weak accountability. Parliamentary accountability has almost disappeared and been destroyed as a result of that trend.

Similarly, we have had the establishment of the social partnership network with ever more elaborate procedures to deal with legislation that ought to be dealt with here. In many cases, debates about the distribution of power and resources within our community have migrated away from the Oireachtas, which is elected by the people, into the social partnership arrangements. Those arrangements are currently in abeyance. The issue is not the value of social partnership, however, but the accountability of decision making that properly belongs to Parliament. We have been edged out in so many of these areas.

Happily, the Fourth Estate is not with us, but changing media coverage has obviously altered the way the Dáil works. It is theatrics which catch the media eye. We do not have to cast our minds back too far to see how one phrase dominated coverage of a particular debate, which imposed cuts worth hundreds of millions of euro on some of the most vulnerable sections of our community. Yet if an outsider watched what the Dáil was doing that day, they would think it was presiding over some sort of circus. I think that has damaged us.

The Oireachtas is demanding 65% more in resources than it did five years ago, but in every one of these areas we are witnessing less genuine product and less scrutiny. The Oireachtas is less able to hold power to account, which is the vital role. We need to look at value for money in a crude accountancy sense by asking how many people are doing different staff exercises, whether there is duplication and if people are employed to best effect. In addition, however, we must also question the purposes and extent to which the Dáil has let itself slip into lazy patterns, thus allowing power to move away from it.

We now face real challenges and must do three things as a result. First, we have to follow the money, which is something we have abysmally failed to do. Second, we must hold power to account, which we have also failed to do. Third, we must offer some leadership at this time. The old phrase "money talks" is correct. We have a bizarre situation whereby we decide our budgets not on the basis of whether agencies are delivering high performance, but on what they got last year. Agencies come in here with plus or minus 1% or 2%, which is their Estimate for next year. When we make decisions on what we will assign to different agencies, we are not presented with any information about the targets they are setting for themselves or their delivery in the past year. Agencies do not bid for money based on the value of their performance, but on the basis of what they did last year. That is totally unacceptable in a modern parliamentary system.

One may ask why the public service has not reformed itself, but I am asking why the Oireachtas has not changed the way it assigns money. If so, we could for once start to reward agencies and managers who deliver high performance. We could recognise that in the way we assign our money. The Government predominantly dictates the way in which we assess how money is spent in this House, but that Dickensian system must change.

I have been a Member of this House for a long time and I have seen things get worse, not better. I have seen taxation and expenditure measures being brought in on the same day, yet that was trumpeted as a new system of budgetary accountability. What a joke. It meant that both spending and tax were then veiled by the secrecy of the budget. Previously, we got at least two weeks when we saw the spending proposals before the budget debate. There was some semblance of a debate about what the choices were, albeit a truncated and inadequate one. It is ludicrous to vote money through the budget when it will be a further six months before Departments bestir themselves to tell us what targets they might have. We will complete our study of those half way through the year in which the money has already been spent.

On behalf of the Committee of Public Accounts, Deputy Rabbitte offered a model for changing that, but it was met by a stony silence on the Government side of the House. It is not good enough to give them bread and circuses, having the Oireachtas amply provided with resources, but not give it the tasks it needs to undertake. There has to be a change in the way we spend public money. Equally, there must be a change in the way the Oireachtas holds power to account. Powerful interests in this society have not been held up to probing scrutiny whatsoever. Instead they have been greeted with accepting faith by regulators, by and large.

Recently, I listened to the ESB regulator saying why costs were going up there - it was because the ESB said its costs were going up and therefore the regulator put the prices up. What sort of scrutiny or regulation is that? A regulator is obliged to look beneath those facts and challenge the costs to see if we are competitive and effective in doing what other agencies do. We know we are not. We have one of the most expensive electricity systems. The same is true with regard to the effectiveness of our banking system. We thought we had regulators who were regulating and riding shotgun on the banks, but the banks increased credit at breathtaking speed. Every red light of banking was on, but nothing was done about the situation.

The Oireachtas may criticise others - I agree they hold the primary responsibility - but we need to learn from what has happened. We must institute systems where the Oireachtas will genuinely hold people to account. It must hold the regulators to account. We should vet the appointment of people to these positions. We should vet the boards that represent the State in spending these moneys. These areas should be vetted. It is not some outrageous request from the Oireachtas or some attempt to set up a Star Chamber to expect that people would be willing to come before the representatives of taxpayers before they take up a post. They should have a mandate that is meaningful to the Oireachtas and be seen to be people with adequate skills to do the job. However, we are denied that.

We need to supervise the budgets these agencies get. We need to set performance standards for them and to be able to verify at the end of the year that they measured up to those standards. We need to force these agencies to compare themselves to international benchmarks of best practice. When the financial services legislation was being debated in the House, I remember saying to the then Minister, Charlie McCreevy, that he had just put a bulldog clip around the regulations we had in the past and presented them to a new agency and said that was best practice. The regulations were never examined to check whether they squared up to international best practice at the time. That task was not done because the public service has allowed itself to be dumbed down and hollowed out by all these agencies it has set up. Now it does not have the capacity to evaluate what they are doing. We must pull that power back into the public service and into a system that is accountable here in the House. We seriously need to pull ourselves up in this regard.

To return to the issue of the allocation of resources in the House, I agree we have doubled administration, but to what extent has that increased the forensic work of holding power to account, holding budgets to account and demanding standards of performance from those who work on our behalf? The answer is that it has only done so to a very limited extent. The Minister of State praised the resources in the Oireachtas Library, but the library is a long way from the cutting edge of parliamentary accountability. We need closer accountability with regard to resources and need genuine parliamentary accountability in the House. We have had too many years operating in a comfort zone and must strip that away now. We must recognise that governments are fallible and the role we have in holding governments to account is an important part of political accountability that we have allowed become derailed.

It requires Government to change this also. It is unacceptable that large agencies of the scale of the HSE and FÁS are not accountable to the House in a meaningful fashion and that we cannot demand access to information. Every Deputy will admit we do not get this accountability. We need to equip the House to do that important work. As we have learned in recent times, the failure to do that work adequately has had enormous consequences for us. For that reason, I feel strongly that we need to look beyond some sort of accountant coming in and conducting a slide rule exercise on what we do. That is not the sort of review I want. It is part of what we need, but a much bigger part is deciding on best practice for parliamentary scrutiny. We must ask how we get from where we are - the bottom of the fourth division in my view - to the top of the first division. In the Lemass-Whittaker era, politics changed events. Politics set a new vision, made new demands and drove a new way of doing things. We are in a similar situation now. If politicians do not step up to plate now and are not willing to do things differently, we will fail.

This Bill, slipped in as it is at the end of the session, unfortunately, prevents what I believe is a much more important debate. With the utmost respect to the Minister of State, it should not be handled by a junior Minister. This Bill deals with the core of governance. The question is whether the Oireachtas can square up to the challenge of governance. I know the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Power, well and I think he would probably agree on the need to change many things. He would also agree we have seen a slow bicycle race on the issue of reform. For as long as I have been here, we have seen the issue of reform sidetracked. I do not blame any particular Administration for that. When one gets on the Government side of the House, one tends to wonder why the opportunity to scrutinise should be given to the Opposition when one did not have that opportunity oneself when in opposition. Perhaps this is the time, when the Fianna Fáil Administration is probably facing its dying period in government and faces, forcibly or otherwise, a period in opposition, to make changes that would provide a decent job to Members on both sides of the House. While I do not believe the Minister of State is empowered to provide the reform, I hope the wisdom of the former Ceann Comhairle, who intends to speak, will prevail upon others to see the need to change if we want to square up to these challenges.

This is something about which I feel strongly. Perhaps this runs in the family because when my brother was here, he also felt strongly about it. There is much undone business in the area of reform, for example, with regard to the spending of public money. In the 1980s, when we did not have two farthings to rub together, we introduced programme expenditure reporting, which ensured we could see how much was going to something such as the apprenticeship programme, what the output of that programme was, the cost per person trained, and the placement success of the programme. At a time when we did not have two pence to rub together, we were able to do that. That only lasted two years before some gremlins in the Department of Finance decided it was too expensive. Is it not some reflection on priorities that it was too expensive to give us information on what our money was achieving? The same people have allowed power to slip out to agencies without proper mandates or accountability, which has damaged the country. We must now rethink this. McCarthy has offered us an agenda. He proposed closing down 43 agencies, affecting some hundreds of bodies. That is only the start. We must genuinely reform the way we do our business.

I apologise for going on for longer than I should have, but it is important we take a hard look at the Houses over the nine month period our amendment suggests. I hope the Minister of State will accept our amendment and will return to his colleagues and say it is about more than just finding some consultant to go into the Oireachtas Commission with a slide rule to tell us we should trim this or that agency or replace somebody doing two jobs with one person. This is about examining what the Oireachtas is about, its task and how to deploy its resources to deliver that task effectively.

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