Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)

I will ask specific questions about the Minister of State's intentions. He is aware of the position here every Thursday morning, when party leaders try to devise something within the existing restrictive Standing Orders to ask Leaders' Questions. Does the Minister of State agree this needs to be addressed immediately to allow Leaders' Questions on a Thursday morning? The Minister is probably aware that the Labour Party may have some responsibility for the current position as we agreed to the Taoiseach being absent on a Thursday morning. The Taoiseach does not have to be present for Leaders' Questions and the de facto position, as the Ceann Comhairle is well aware, is that there are Leaders' Questions now on a Thursday morning and the issue should be formalised.

The Order of Business is the only device available to Members of the House to raise current issues and they must try to find a Bill to attach to the interested matter. Does the Minister of State agree that it would be desirable to have time for discussing current issues in the Dáil at the time we are pretending to talk about the Order of Business but actually debating current issues?

The other matter, referred to by Deputy Stanton, is the Adjournment Debate, which is now farcical. Ministers or Ministers of State who do not know anything about a subject simply read a script which was badly prepared by some civil servant who is not politically or directly involved, or who does not know about the issues. No supplementary questions are allowed and this needs immediate reform. I ask the Minister of State to include such matters in a package.

I hope the Minister of State has included the next issue in the package, and if not, he should include it. It concerns quangos, of which there are approximately 200, and to which we vote public money. Ministers are responsible for them. I ask that this House be given back the authority given by the public and the people who sent us here to ask questions about the spending of that public money. There are devices at committee level to do so but the primary function of Members of the House is to ask questions about State bodies under the remit of various Ministers, with Ministers having the responsibility to answer. I ask the Minister of State to include that in his Dáil reform package, which I hope will be circulated in order to discuss it before the meeting of the sub-committee. Is the Minister of State aware that prior to the establishment of the HSE, we could ask a question in the House about health issues and they were answered in three days? The current Minister has installed a parliamentary section in the HSE but it takes as much as two months to get an answer. Sometimes, I have been telephoned to be criticised for tabling a question in the first place.

The Minister tells us she is referring a question to the HSE. After there has been no answer for one, two or three months, a Deputy asks the question again, but he or she gets the same answer about referring it to the HSE. This situation is unsatisfactory and does not hold the HSE to account by method of parliamentary inquiry, as should be the case.

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