Jim Higgins (Fine Gael)

I appreciate that but one would imagine that if an amendment is published in a person's name, he or she would have the courage of his or her convictions to come into the House and defend it, particularly if it has been tabled by the party to which he or she belongs and is part and parcel of its policy.

I listened to the defence of the proposal mounted by Senator Dooley who was sent in first to punch on behalf of the Government. The word "punch" is an overstatement because he did not punch at all. He stated that the Executive manages the economy and that far too much power is vested in agencies and semi-State bodies, but did not advance a single cogent argument in defence of the Government's actions. I wonder who sent him into the House.

I listened to the Minister of State indicate that deficiencies were discovered with regard to the disbursement of funds. The only deficiency in this regard is that the Government could not get its hands on the fund, failed to anticipate its enormity and now wants to disburse it. The Minister of State stated, for example, in an odd form of acknowledgement, that the Minister for Finance, Deputy McCreevy, slipped up when introducing the legislation. I read the Minister's Second Stage speech and summation in the Dáil on 20 June 2001, when he was at pains to point out that his officials and the officials of the Office of the Attorney General had done tremendous work in laboriously going through all the possible infringements of the rights of the public as regards access to money and the State's right, in certain circumstances, to access money belonging to the public. It was, he stated, only after the officials had gone through the legislation line by line and dotted the i's and crossed the t's that they decided to introduce it. Where were the deficiencies to which the Minister of State referred at that point? The only deficiency is that the Government has discovered there is a bonanza waiting to be tapped and it cannot countenance the possibility of any independent agency having access to it.

The Minister of State referred to a recent meeting he had with the Dormant Accounts Fund Disbursements Board and stated it only has five staff. The easy way to redress that problem would be to transfer staff from Departments and provide the fund with additional resources, instead of making a decision to sideline the new disbursements board by replacing it with ADM. The composition of the board was seen as manifestly suitable when the Minister appointed it. It was composed of one representative of the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs; one representative of the financial services industry nominated by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority; three persons with knowledge and experience of the sectors that would benefit from the fund, that is, from the voluntary community sector, the disability sector and the education sector; and three nominees of the Minister, including the chief executive of a disability organisation. The Minister had the power to appoint four board members. That simply was not good enough. It could not guarantee that the money would not be dispensed as a political favour in the context of pet projects identified by the Government. Now the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Deputy Ó Cuív, is proposing to give the Government responsibility for appointing the chairperson and the board of directors of ADM and has asked that the existing ADM members stand aside. What neck, gall and arrogance. This is in order to allow the Government to stuff the board with its own political cronies in order to decide where the money should go. That is an absolute disgrace.

I was very interested in the PDs' suggestion that the status quo should remain for the €30 million that is about to be disbursed — what a sop that is — and that the proposal should go ahead. That is a typical PD out. It is a way out because the PDs do not have the gall, the guts, the conviction or the political determination to stand up to what is manifestly a travesty of justice in the disbursement of these funds.

What I cannot understand about the PDs is that once they showed bottle. They showed bottle in regard to Abbotstown, the "Bertie Bowl". They showed bottle regarding the disbursement of lottery funds. They insisted on legislation being introduced to ensure that the disbursement of lottery funds would at lease have some fragment of transparency to them. Here there is a fundamental wrong, an indefensible situation, a volte-face by the Government, and the PDs are prepared to jog along with it. I know from the comments of Senator Minihan that he has a problem with this. If he has a problem why does he not take the ultimate action and go to his party leader, the Tánaiste, who is second-in-command in the Government, and tell her the PDs cannot countenance this and will not agree to it and that the Government will simply have to reverse the throttle? The PDs have lost all their backbone. They are what we always believed, a microcosm of Fianna Fáil, and they should go back to their roots.