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

I say that tongue in cheek. It was to his credit that he got the promotion. However, he was only in the Department of Children and Youth Affairs for six weeks, but he is captured in this legislation while that Department's Secretary General is not. I saw an e-mail yesterday outlining that a new Secretary General had been approved by the Government. That person could be in place for the next seven years. There is no logic in excluding Secretaries General. Is this just another instance of passing legislation to regulate politicians without also capturing the permanent government, including county managers and directors of services who can be in place for many years? How anyone can draft legislation that requires people to register if they lobby local councillors but not if they only lobby council managers or directors of services is wrong. The same applies at Government level, in that one must register when lobbying a Minister, Minister of State - some Ministers are only in position for a matter of weeks or months - or Deputy, but not when lobbying a permanent Secretary General or assistant secretary general. This is not good enough. It feeds into the belief that, for some reason, anyone who deals with politicians must be regulated.

The Minister has only listed politicians as designated public officials under section 6. Regardless of whether he believes it, public cynicism about the democratic process and politicians is fed when he believes that he must draft legislation that only includes Ministers, Ministers of State, Deputies, Senators, MEPs, local authority members and ministerial special advisers. Ministers and the like are only the elected heads for a short time.

I provided an example yesterday. If someone wanted to lobby on the sale of shares in AIB, he or she would put a case to Goldman Sachs. Yesterday, the Minister confirmed that he specifically excluded consultants. One does not approach the Minister for Finance to get a point of view included in a report by Goldman Sachs. Rather, one probably speaks to people at Goldman Sachs or the assistant secretary general who deals with Goldman Sachs and will present a summary of the report to the Minister, yet the Minister, Deputy Howlin, has excluded both categories.

We are nearing 12 noon. We have not been able to complete the Bill, so we will need to spend a bit more time on it this afternoon. I am sure-----

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