Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)

I thank the Acting Chairman.

I want to refer briefly to remarks made by Deputy Donnelly during the debate on Dáil reform last night. He, a fresher Deputy only a wet day in the House, made derogatory personal remarks about me, which has never happened to me in the 24 years I have served here. It is probably one of the many flashes in the pan I have seen in my time here. As a fresher or rookie, Deputy Donnelly would be expected to have some respect for other Members of the House and, if not for them, at least for the people who sent us here. Perhaps he will reflect on that.

I join the Chief Whip, Deputy Paul Kehoe, in welcoming the ongoing consultative process. It is not just about the mechanics of the way the Dáil operates on a day to day basis but much wider reform of the institutions and procedures for making the decisions required, and this debate is part of that process.

This is a legislative assembly and not a debating society. Its time is divided into periods where the Government is kept to account by means of questions to Ministers and to the Taoiseach, and also by Adjournment debates and three hours per week of Private Members' time. The balance of the time is Government time during which legislation is debated and decided upon. How to make better use of that time to both legislate and keep the Executive to account is a task we are undertaking. I believe there is a large measure of goodwill on all sides of the House to achieve that objective. The Government reform programme outlined last night by the Minister, Deputy Howlin, is the main stimulus for the project we are undertaking.

I will briefly touch again on an issue I raised last night, that is, the power of quangos and what we have done with the power of this House in regard to quangos. There is a specific undertaking in the programme for Government that this will be dealt with in the form of making the quangos responsible to this House through the Ministers under whose remit they come. In other words, Members will be able to ask questions of Ministers who have quangos under their remit and get replies. Currently, that is not the position.

A huge tranche of power has been transferred out of this House and out of the power of the people to faceless people who are not accountable to the people in any real sense. That has reduced and diluted democracy when the real power in democracy is the power to ask a question and get an answer. That has been removed from us in a very large area where previously we could ask questions but we can no longer do so because they are not allowed. I welcome the fact that there is some move to bring that power back into the Chamber.

On the ordinary workday in the Dáil, real changes are necessary to keep the Executive to account and enable us to legislate effectively. The taking of new topical issues early in the day, referred to previously, with supplementary questions is a major change from the old system of Adjournment debates where a Minister of State would come in with a sheaf of replies prepared by civil servants that Ministers never saw and read them out to the House. That is a travesty of parliamentary procedure.

There is no doubt that the Order of Business is a shambles. It is a shambles because there is no proper procedure for ordinary Members of the House to raise current issues and they then try to find a means through the Order of Business to attach it to legislation to get it mentioned. That was an ineffective way of doing it but it was out of order. We must find a means by which Members can raise current issues that arise on the day, and not just by way of pre-notice, and get some form of responsible reply from Government. That is important. This issue has been raised already by a number of Deputies.

Question Time is dominated by the spokespersons for the groups. That is not true of the Technical Group but of the Opposition parties. It is dominated by them and abused by them in so far as they put in the maximum number of questions which are then all taken in the name of the spokesperson. That is not a satisfactory system for parliamentary questions. Deputy Wallace mentioned that in the debate last night and I strongly support him in that regard.

We should have a system - all Deputies have said this - whereby if a parliamentary question is put down in one's name and one is not in the House when that question is reached, it moves on to the next question. The situation should not arise where one Member of the House can take 15, 20 or 30 questions and beat the lottery by doing so in that he or she puts down the maximum number of questions and they are sure to come out of the lottery.

Raising matters under Standing Order 32, which we see abused as well, is meant only for national crises but again Members are using it because there is no system available to them to raise current issues. That should be changed. There should be a requirement for Standing Order 32 motions to have at least five Members signing them before they are raised.

On the question Deputy Catherine Murphy raised about a master plan, those of us on this side of the House have no excess amount of intelligence or knowledge about how to do that. If she can come up with a good master plan I ask her to produce it as quickly as she can and we will all examine it. We might be able to implement bits of it and put it together as a jigsaw but we have no special amount of expertise to do that no more than the Members opposite. Perhaps we can all work together on that. The process in which we are involved allows us to do that.

I refer to local government reform which is a prominent part of the Government reform programme. Local government in Ireland is a misnomer. We do not have local government, we have local administration by a system of highly paid managers and directors of service. Managers are paid about the same salary as a Minister and the programme managers are paid more than Deputies.

In Kildare we have a manager and eight programme managers. We have engineers coming out of our ears, so to speak. We have engineers for everything in Kildare and when they want to do something they hire consultants to tell them what to do. One group of engineers is involved in monitoring the consultants when they are doing their work and another group is involved in interpreting the consultants' work.

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