Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----for tabling this motion. It is not appropriate that we merely have discussions on Government expenditure occasionally when an Opposition group tables a motion. This matter must concern us all the time if we as a Parliament are doing our job responsibly and effectively.

There is no need for me to rehearse the various overspends on OPW and other projects that have been interrogated to death in the media and on the floor of the House in recent weeks and which have led to this motion. I know from experience and the Minister of State knows very well from his experience that the OPW is a proud organisation with a long track record of achievement throughout the history of this State. I, for one, do not want to see the OPW, given the value of the work it and its staff do, become a watchword for waste and inefficiency. There has been a fair degree of opportunism displayed in this House and elsewhere in recent times in respect of various headline-grabbing projects, but that does not mean criticism and critique are not warranted or that these overspends do not need to be addressed and debated. On the contrary, the public has a right to feel Departments and State bodies always treat public money with respect and ensure value for money.

We are all well aware of the degree of public disquiet over this issue. In recent weeks, we had a national Sunday newspaper outline a litany of what it described as overspends on OPW projects. The Dáil bike shed on steroids is how the Irish Mail on Sunday framed a series of projects costing, it says, €50 million that failed to comply with the State's procurement rules. The Minister of State was quoted in that article as saying he wanted to rebuild the brand of the OPW. He has a job on his hands and I wish him well because the hard-working people of the OPW do not deserve to become a byword for waste in the media or in this House. This is not just a people problem; it is a process problem. The processes by which the State and its agencies go about capital spending clearly need an overhaul. This is where our focus needs to be, instead of demanding heads on plates like some people on these benches will inevitably try to do.

We were all out knocking on doors a few weeks ago and there is nobody in this House who did not have a constituent raise with them the bike shed or the security pavilion when we were canvassing. Few things irritate members of the public more than the feeling their money is being wasted on trinkets or lost through bad practice. It is up to the new Government to get to grips with this issue quickly. All of us in the political system have responsibility to do that. Heads rolling without processes changing leaves us nowhere. There must be a root-and-branch examination of how Government spends money, particularly at a time when there is a lot of money to spend. At a time when coffers are full, the potential for waste is at its highest and the Government must be at its most vigilant. Unfortunately, we only seem to do reform and be interested in reform in this country in the context of a crisis. We should always be vigilant about the spending of public money and focused on transparency in decision-making, responsibility and accountability, not just at a time of fiscal crisis.

A number of weeks ago I had an exchange with the Minister of State on the floor of the House during oral questions. We had an engagement on oversight and governance of OPW projects. The Minister of State mentioned some changes he was initiating with his officials. I welcomed this move at the time. He referred to the term "guidance" and said new guidance would be issued for the spending and management of projects. I would rather talk of rules, regulations and compliance than of guidance, which, for too many people, sounds woolly.

I would rather talk, as well, of culture shifts in institutions and real accountability and making that happen. The way we do accountability in this country is not acceptable in this day and age. It needs to be modernised. The idea a Minister is accountable, literally, for every box of paper clips his or her Department uses is fanciful and outrageous. What we need is wholesale reform of the anachronistic Ministers and Secretaries Act and changes to the Carltona doctrine to usher in a modern form of governance and ensure those actually making decisions are made accountable. That is a modern form of accountability. The kind of accountability we do in this House, where hard-working public servants, some of whom may make mistakes, are hauled in front of the Committee of Public Accounts or the line committee for their Department, made an example of and publicly humiliated, is not accountability. Nothing changes. There is an innate unfairness there. That is not to say that if we ascribe more responsibility to civil servants and expect them to put their hands up and acknowledge mistakes, we are letting a Minister off the hook. There needs to be a proper balance and a modern form of accountability that makes sense in 21st century Ireland, not in the 1920s.

In recent weeks, overspend stories from the Arts Council and the National Gallery have dominated the headlines, but these are symptomatic of a wider problem across the system. This motion suggests there is a systematic dysfunction across government in public expenditure control. It is a very generalised and sweeping statement. I do not believe that is the case at all. There are some egregious examples that point to serious problems but fixing those problems should not be beyond us.

A solution proposed by the motion is the establishment of an independent watchdog for Government spending. I have no objection in principle to exploring this but I have some concerns. Arguably, if the Department of public expenditure and reform, the Office of Government Procurement and the relevant individuals and divisions in Departments and agencies were doing their job properly, we would not be discussing this at all. We would not need that kind of suggestion. The solution is there already. There is oversight of this kind built into our system and my question to the movers of the motion is this: who would watch the watchdog?

Would it be accountable to the Dáil? We are the people who hold Departments, Ministers and officials to account, and that is a principle we need to protect. We do not want this new body to become some kind of Musk-inspired DOGE-like entity that sees the solution to every spending problem in the firing of the nearest available public servant. That will create more problems than it will solve. The danger here is that this is often viewed through the lens of an anti-public service and anti-public sector reactionary agenda. That should not be the case. With that said, it is a fact we do not do accountability properly in this country, and this has been shown in the way issues around overspends and lack of compliance have been handled to date.

If we were in any doubt whatsoever about this Government's allergy to accountability, we need only have watched the election campaign debates. On one occasion our new Tánaiste, then Taoiseach, who was once our Minister for Health, tried to distance himself from by far the greatest overspend in the Government's budget, which is the money-eating national children's hospital. I was amused to hear the Tánaiste opine last week on the issue of the X-ray machine in the National Gallery. He said he was furious. Somebody needs to remind him of the role he played in signing off on the national children's hospital initiative and the lack of oversight there.

I say to the movers of the motion that if they look at the make-up of the board of the national children's hospital, there is probably a majority of people from high-profile business backgrounds on that board. That is something worth mentioning. Some of the same people who said back in the 2000s that we should have Michael O'Leary as Minister for Transport and Seánie FitzPatrick as Minister for Finance are the same people saying that business has the solution to all of our oversight and governance problems. It does not. There is certainly expertise in the business community that could be introduced to the public sector, and that has happened, to help us do things better, but it is not a panacea for all our ills.

In the context of my response and that of the Labour Party to this motion, I do not want to feed into any kind of anti-public sector agenda that is out there. I would be the last person to do that. Ultimately, if we are to protect the hard-working public servants in these State bodies, we have to give them the systems and tools to allow them to deliver their work in a way that is efficient and gives not only value for money but also great service to the public, as most people in the public sector do and strive to do every day. That is something that everyone in this House should strive to do. I am not interested at all in going down a cul-de-sac as part of a blame game, but we clearly have a problem here, so let us work together to fix it once and for all.

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