Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have sympathy with the members of the Government who have been posed with the problems so eloquently described by Deputy Durkan, but I would have more sympathy if they tackled them in a different way. I have problems with the Bill, first with its presentation and, second, with the way the members of the Government attack the cuts that they inevitably feel they must make.

The House will forgive me for not being informed, as I have only just run this information off the computer. I decided to have a look at a couple of the quangos that the Government has so loudly proclaimed its intention to abolish or reform. Before cutting social welfare, one should consider other possibilities.

I came across a little company called the Private Security Authority, PSA, a semi-State with a small budget. It is one of what Fine Gael in opposition called the land of a thousand quangos that it loudly crusaded to reduce in numbers because of extraordinary waste, duplication and lack of necessity. While I am not well informed about the PSA, I discovered in the first few minutes of reading its report that it is like many quangos, in that it does not fall under much examination, including by the House's committees and, I suspect, the Minister who is in charge of it.

It is difficult to find out very much about this because, despite its obligations, it has not laid its annual report before the House for at least five of the last seven years. It has not put it in the Oireachtas Library and nobody has noticed. However, one will find out from the report that the board, which is well paid, has managed to have five meetings every year to look at this industry, which is undoubtedly in need of supervision, at a cost per board meeting of just under €2,000 per member. That is only one of nearly 1,000 quangos which are not being properly examined. There is no time to examine them properly at committees on which Members of the House sit. As a member of the Committee of Public Accounts, I am aware of that many of these Government bodies are not examined with the sort of scrutiny that they should be every year by Members of the Oireachtas because there are so many quangos and so few Members.

We have a whole sector of Government bodies running amok, unpoliced, with political appointees at the top, no known expertise and accountable to nobody. Given the Fine Gael pledges in the programme for Government, the Government should examine these 1,000 bodies to see if there is room for cuts, rather than giving that role to each Department and saying that each Minister will make the cuts. These quangos represent a Celtic tiger explosion of wealth under the former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern - not this Government - who created quangos galore to suit political purposes. They should now be abolished. That is where the first line of cuts should come. We should concentrate on that attitude. We should not ask individual Ministers to do this in their own Departments. We should appoint one person - perhaps the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, whose job it is - to say that is where the cuts will come and they will be examined individually. The Government asked to be judged on that count, but I believe it has failed.

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