Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)

Like every other speaker, I have absolutely no reason to question the competence of the selected candidate, partly because I do not know enough about what happened, or about the other candidates, and because I was not involved in the competition. I wish Mr. McCarthy well in the position he is about to take up.

I have serious reservations, however, about the procedure adopted to appoint top public servants. I cannot understand why, in this particular case, the Government did not decide to hold interviews that would have included Members of the Oireachtas. Why, for instance, were Deputies not included on this particular panel? Why were members of the Committee of Public Accounts not asked to sit on this panel to interview the candidates in question or, at least, the chosen candidate? Why was this not taken as the great opportunity, about which we heard so much last year, to ask those who are put into these top positions to answer questions in pulbic about their plans and their competencies, before Oireachtas committees? This was an ideal opportunity to do that but it was not taken up. The problem is it is all done completely and utterly behind closed doors.

I am told - correctly, I believe, because I was told by the Department which has been very helpful about it - there were 15 applications for this particular job. Six were asked to come for preliminary interviews and three people came to the last interview, all three of whom were public or civil servants. They were insiders. The last Comptroller and Auditor General was an insider, as was his immediate predecessor. A pattern is developing here whereby insiders are always appointed in a behind closed doors situation with the nomination being brought to the Dáil for rubber-stamping by all the parties. This is a flawed procedure and one which I believe should be broken and departed from in all areas of the public service in order to give the public confidence that those who are being selected are being selected in a way in which they can have confidence. The interview boards are also stuffed with insiders. That is a dangerous situation in which the Department finds itself.

According to a letter written to Deputy McGuinness on 26 March 2012, the interview board consisted of a former Secretary General, of the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport I believe, although it is not stated; the Governor of the Central Bank, the former Comptroller and Auditor General, Mr. John Buckley, the Comptroller and Auditor General of Northern Ireland, two Top Level Appointments Committee, TLAC, nominees, one private sector representative and one from the public sector. My reading of that is that there is only one person there with any private sector experience or knowledge, which seems to me to indicate that the result of this particular interview was almost preordained. It was going to be someone from inside the Comptroller and Auditor General's Office, if such a person applied. What I cannot understand is why the interview board is full of insiders. It has a majority of career public servants. I think there is one person from the private sector on it. Why do we not have public hearings that would give an opportunity to the candidates in question, or the candidate who is selected, to come before Members of the Dáil and the Seanad to answer questions? That would allow the public to have confidence in appointments of this nature. That would be a great innovation. It would have been a great departure on this occasion. I have no reason to believe there would have been a different result. It would have enabled us to see how the procedure worked. We might even have seen someone from the private sector making an application. I regret that did not happen. I ask the Minister to consider the possibility of making sure it happens in future.

I am a little alarmed about the apparent lack of a scoring procedure when the interviews happened. The usual pretty meaningless criteria for evaluating someone's ability - their CVs and management expertise etc. - were used. At the end of the day, we got the situation we were likely to get in the first place, in light of the fact that the process took place in such secrecy and with so little openness. Given that insiders were interviewing insiders, it is not surprising that an insider was chosen. That is what happened on the last three occasions. I do not know if it happened prior to that because I am not familiar with the history of the appointments to the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General.

Before I conclude, I would like to mention one further thing about which I am worried. I do not know whether the Minister will reply at the end of this debate.

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