Derek McDowell (Labour)

As a general rule, more flexibility should be given to people on State boards to be open, even at the risk of criticising Government policy. We should be slow to go the usual route of imposing gagging orders, which is what we do routinely. I tabled this amendment with that in mind. This is a good example of a board that is not implementing Government policy. It is not like CIE. It would not have been asking too much to give the chief executive officer the authority to respond to whatever questions they wish to answer.