Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

To test the promise made, we brought forward the legislation which, it goes without saying, the Minister has not taken up. We brought the Bill forward because at that stage the Government was talking about the sale of State assets. It has since privatised the national lottery licence and parts of Bord Gáis and its customer base and meters, which has a resonance for the other subsidiary of Bord Gáis in relation to Irish Water. There is nothing except a Government majority preventing that from happening at a later date. The Government has set up NewERA and Irish Water and none of us knows who lobbied who during these processes. That is why we wanted the legislation to be brought forward before all that was done. The financial decision on setting up Irish Water will be one of the larger ones the Government will have taken in terms of new legislation, new State bodies and the sale of various State assets, as I have mentioned, yet all of that was neatly got out of the way before this legislation came to pass.

What most concerns me about the legislation is the mammoth number of omissions. The first thing that needs to be included in the legislation is consultants employed to carry out work on behalf of public bodies. I go back to the national lottery licence. The Minister rightly pointed out that he was not involved and that consultants were employed to deal with it. He was hands off. Believe it or not, consultants are human too, although some people might not think so. People could have lobbied these consultants on the sale of State assets. They might lobby any consultant brought in to modernise any Department or State body. Unless the consultants who are being paid by the public body are brought under this legislation, it will be woefully inadequate. There must be a mechanism for to do this. The Government can outsource a decision to a consultancy firm and people can lobby the consultants. The result can be the one desired by the lobbyists and the Government can state, "But nobody lobbied us." That is not good enough and we must deal with the issue.

We must also consider, as the Minister suggests in the last paragraph of his speech, the provision regarding employers with fewer than ten employees. I come at this from a couple of points of view and most of what I say will work its way into amendments which the Minister will receive. We will go back over my script and the Minister's officials will have time to consider from where I am coming. The ten employee provision appears, on the face of it, to be fine to avoid tormenting small companies in trying to lobby for something simple. However, many businesses are run through shelf companies. Some of the largest construction contracts handed out through public procurement processes go to developers with few or no employees. We are tired of talking about main contractors who pass jobs on to subcontractors who pass them on again. The main contractor for the job may be a shelf company taken on for a specific project worth tens of millions of euro. While the intention in the ten employee provision is good, we must capture more people than that number. Many of the largest companies in the country have shelf companies within their organisational structures. One could have a holding company in which all decisions are made and which has no employees. It may just be a chairman, the secretary and a board with no staff. We must have a mechanism to catch all of these.

The Minister referred to the issue of the representative bodies. How many times have I been lobbied by RECI or electrical or security contractors with only two or three employees? However, they are big organisations when they get going. One might have to consider turnover, as well as issues such as representative bodies in terms of the group of which a company is part. I acknowledge that this is getting complicated, whether it be €5 million or €10 million, but if there are companies in the market for large contracts, there must be a mechanism to capture them. The requirement in respect of having ten employees is too narrow when it comes to business transactions. An example would be companies liable to be audited. They must have a certain turnover and be of a certain size. I am not saying the exact figure that should apply, but that size is closer to the scale of a company about which Revenue will want to know. I am trying to be helpful by making some suggestions other than about the employees, but I understand the Minister's position.

The Minister might clarify where all this legislation will fit in under the freedom of information legislation. I presume the Standards in Public Office, SIPO, is subject to the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Act but there are references in the report to the effect that it can issue summaries of reports etc. There is no point in inserting that in the legislation if the full report is capable of being got under FOI-----

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