Brendan Ryan (Labour)

There was a lot of heat but not so much new light. The Information Commissioner's report makes interesting reading. It is astonishing that five years after the Freedom of Information Act came into force the original decision maker in the Department of Education and Science could ignore, we are assured without any political interference, the public interest provisions of section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act when making a decision about the disclosure of information. It is extraordinary that a civil servant, presumably whose promotion to a degree at least depends on the goodwill of the Minister, would forget a major section of the Freedom of Information Act in order to come to a conclusion, which just happened to be the same view as that of the Minister.

The former Minister refused to disclose the same information to his own party colleagues and to the new and perhaps naive Fianna Fáil Deputy for Dún Laoghaire, whose name I cannot mention because Senators are not supposed to name Members of the other House. It is an extraordinary coincidence that the former Minister came to exactly the same conclusion and used almost exactly the same language to refuse access to information as that used by the independent freedom of information officer in his Department.

Another strange matter arises from the freedom of information disclosures, rather than the consultancy report about which many people were immediately suspicious once the refusal to disclose it arose. We have all watched Fianna Fáil in particular wriggle under the exigencies of the Freedom of Information Act and its shameless filleting of it because the party decided to wriggle no more on certain matters. The strange matter in the disclosures, and one assumes and accepts that everything relevant has been disclosed, is the absence of one document which one would think central to this issue. That is the document upon which the former Minister based his decision. He decided to ignore his own officials and consultants and to do something different.

We are all now used to the mantra that advice is advice and Ministers make decisions, which is a tenet with which I do not disagree. However, we are entitled to expect that decisions are rational and reasonable and are documented in a manner which allows others to make a judgment about them. In the whole mass of documentation about this issue, there is no document which explains why the former Minister made his decision. There is a press release about the national spatial strategy but there is no mention of intensive lobbying by eminent members of Fianna Fáil, including former Ministers and EU Commissioners. There is no letter from any former Commissioner among the documents disclosed although the name of such a Commissioner appears in the report. One assumes that the telephone must have been used for the purpose of this vigorous lobbying.

Separate from the merits or demerits of the case, this is a scandalous piece of odiferous decision-making by a Minister who has nothing documented in his departmental files to explain why this decision was made. Future decisions will be made in the dark without any written evidence as to how they were made. This most expansive Government, which spends so much money on consultants and advisers, decided to overrule and ignore an eminent former senior civil servant in the Department of Education and Science and did not condescend to include a document in its own files to explain why. We all know why, however. This was not a decision about educational policy or about the national spatial strategy. Nobody is quicker to ignore the national spatial strategy than this Government when it suits it, as it did in the matter of the botched decentralisation programme, a nonsense which will hopefully be abandoned soon. The Government blissfully ignores spatial strategies in that matter in the interests of much more mundane issues like the question of where votes might be attained. This is exactly the same situation.

I have no particular axe to grind but I recognise that reports which were written years ago about the number of students doing subjects such as home economics have been overtaken by events and issues, such as those to do with role models and the status of men and women in society. I am concerned that a process of decision making undertaken by a Minister for Education and Science should be based on reason and analysis. In all the documentation I have seen on this matter, there is no reason and analysis, only big name lobbying and politically expedient decision making. If that is the way decisions about the future of Irish education will generally be made, then the future of Irish education is severely threatened. God help us if the entire OECD report is ignored in the interests of political expediency in response to high level lobbying. Is the entire Kelly report regarding capital investment in third level education no more than a document to be considered and then discarded in the light of political lobbying and expediency?

The situation is clear; a mess has been created of grandiose proportions. The lives of dedicated teachers in St. Catherine's College have been messed up and the future of a fine educational institution undermined and we still do not know why. There is no rational basis detailed in any file in the Department of Education and Science. We know the Department knew the decision stank, however, because the former Minister would not publish any of the related documentation and his officials came to a coincidentally identical conclusion to his own. The Information Commissioner told the Department how wrong it was and so we now know that the reason it did not publish was because the absence of rational decision making would become immediately clear after publication. The rational case was for retention of the status quo; the political case was for the closure of St. Catherine's College. Not for the first time, a Fianna Fáil Minister for Education and Science ignored rationality and the best advice and went for political expediency. He should be ashamed of himself.

Incidentally, the amendment is peculiarly worded and grossly out of order, and should have been ruled as such. It is not the function of Seanad Éireann to confirm a decision to close any institution; such a confirmation forms no part of the Members' constitutional role.