Brendan Ryan (Labour)

What transparent really means is that we know the objectives, the good causes or the good value issues and we know how they will be evaluated according to an objective scale. Ireland has spent 20 years trying to get a transparent method of working out which primary school was next to get its toilets fixed. We have a pretend transparency but it is progress. What we have here is hoo-ha, big advertisements, great publicity and a process which ends up with Ministers talking to Ministers about what to do with it. The amendment to the Freedom of Information Act specifically means that correspondence between Ministers is secret. Therefore, we will not know how the Ministers arrive at their conclusions. They believe, after all they should have learned from the controversies and the election, that transparency means letting people apply and telling them who got it. The only people who believe that is transparency is the Government.

As I said when I raised the question of the commencement date, what it is doing is delaying further the disbursement of funds that do not belong to it. It simply happens that the only way we can disburse these funds is through legislation which can go through the Oireachtas only when the Government supports it, but which if it was not the intention of anybody would become a slush fund for Government. The only way to prevent it becoming a slush fund for Government is to have criteria that are open to scrutiny and that stand up to objective examination.

Amendment No. 2 seeks that the board establish transparent criteria for the disbursement of funds, not criteria for asking and telling people afterwards who got it. For example, if there are ten drugs task forces, tell us why three get it and three do not. There are drugs task forces and a number of other issues relating to illiteracy, homelessness and so on and the Minister has already said there are €300 million worth of applications when the maximum sum may well be less than that amount. Therefore, some people will get money and some will not. Transparency means we should be able to see how and why the decisions were reached and it should stand up to objective scrutiny. That is what real transparency means.

Nobody in Ireland believes any State body could be totally depoliticised. The only way to start this is to take the decision on who gets the money and who does not away from politics and put it into independent boards. That is what my amendment seeks. Only some extraordinary product of the 1950s or the 1960s would believe we have reached an acceptable level of transparency if we are told publicity who gets it and there is an annual report stating how it was additional to expenditure. There is no transparency here. The final decisions will be political and based on criteria which anyone in politics understands but which are entirely at variance with the spirit of the proposal from the DIRT review committee some years ago.