Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I move amendment No. 7:

In page 10, line 20, to delete "Minister" and substitute "Board".

This may be repetitious as we discussed some of this before. The issue is difficult because the Minister has made a genuine effort to listen and respond to what was said here on Committee Stage. However, there is genuine unease that the decision on the allocation of funds will be a political decision.

The Minister has a plausible case. When the Minister first spoke this afternoon he gave a list of criteria for how funding like this should be used with which everybody would agree. Unfortunately, experience is that there are many well publicised cases where what we thought were fixed criteria were not adhered to, for example, Punchestown and a well-known marina. I am more on the side of politics than on the side of delegating everybody. I have spoken frequently about the "tyranny of experts" and claim ownership of that phrase. It is dangerous to allow such tyranny. I do not believe in technocratic government.

I have some sympathy with the Minister's view. However, we all know of some of the strange appointments to public bodies, not all by Fianna Fáil but it has been in Government more than anybody else and tends to make more appointments than any of us. People have been appointed to various bodies over the years by various Governments, but only a Minister with his eyes shut could be of the opinion that they had a particular expertise in the area. Their expertise was often their expertise at looking after the Minister's political interests on the board. That is the problem with this issue of transferring the funds.

I see many advantages in the framework outlined by the Minister. However, it is less likely, and will continue to be less likely, that an independent board could be overridden in the way a group of civil servants of the highest integrity could be bypassed. We have ample evidence of this, even in the Department which is meant to monitor all the rest, the Department of Finance. There, the will of the Minister, as we know, bypassed the criteria the Department had set up for evaluating funding. I do not want to get into a cynical argument about that, but this is a genuine issue.

I accept the Minister's point that sometimes political interference might be necessary to put some humanity into the matter. However, in the two cases I mentioned, we can see no justification for the way in which the established criteria were ignored other than political advantage for the Ministers in question. It was good for them politically to do what they did.

If the Minister is determined to do it his way, it behoves him to give us some reason to believe that under similar pressures of political exigency, Ministers will not bypass all his fine criteria and use funds from the dormant accounts fund and take the consequences afterwards. All he said, and all the contumely from the Opposition was directed at the heads of the Ministers who behaved that way, but little difference did it make — one of them is now a European Commissioner.

The Opposition has a function. Good public administration also has a function. I am not convinced that any system — I accept the Minister has endeavoured to improve it — which leaves the decision within the direct political process can ever be as transparent or as guaranteed to be independent as public body boards. I am not so naive as to believe that these boards are entirely independent of political pressure. However, the extra barriers reduce the possibilities of arbitrary political interference. We have plentiful evidence of arbitrary political interference, but that is what the Minister says will not happen. I cannot see how he can ever put together an administrative and decision-making system which will not be effectively the same as the board — even if it was in his Department — which would guarantee the absence of arbitrary interference. That is why, however we work through this — this arises also under section 8 — the fundamental issue remains regarding how we can give an absolute guarantee of absence of capricious political interference once the decision is within the remit of the Minister.