Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 5:

In page 22, between lines 39 and 40, to insert the following:"(9) The Agency shall maintain a register of declared interests of all members of the Agency which will be publicly available including on the Agency's website.".

I will not go over this ground again. I have refined the amendment which referred to members of the agency only, not all staff. There should be a register of declared interests. It is terrible governance that the only place in which to find a register of declared interests is the minutes of a meeting. One would have to trawl through the minutes of various meetings. The agency should, at a minimum, maintain a secret register of declared interests. For the purposes of transparency though, that register should be public. Each Deputy must declare interests. Someone who is a member of the agency should also declare his or her interests. This relates to the core issue in some of my amendments - transparency and accountability. The public and investigative journalists uncover failures to declare interests. This has happened time and again throughout Irish history, not just in the 1940s or 1950s but regularly. If one does not have a register, one will not be able to engage in this type of investigative journalism to determine whether, when an agency makes a decision on X, Y or Z, one of its members has an undeclared interest. Legitimate questions could be asked about whether that person had absented himself or herself from the meeting or tried to influence its outcome.

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