Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

If that were to happen in this case, does the Senator not think there would be a danger of the board resigning due to the Minister not applying the plan? That would happen if it thought the Minister had gone off the rails. If the board resigned, one would be in right trouble.

The group has to write a report examining the criteria and each decision to see if it was made strictly according to those criteria and if the criteria fulfil the remit of the plan in terms of additionality and so on. There is limited room for manoeuvre.

One other thing which I have often said is that I may be working in a strange Department. One feature that has been a hallmark of my tenure in the Department since 2002 has been an incredibly strict adherence to good governance criteria. Incredibly detailed audits have been carried out to assess if any loopholes exist, even for schemes that already have detailed criteria.

I do not make most of the decisions. Mechanisms are in place to assess criteria according to which decisions are made. We check to ensure there are no loopholes in the system by which a decision we make could be misused. We examine all the procedures right down to payments.

We have consistently tried to implement systems as regards all our procedures during the past two years. Some schemes in my Department go back to the 1950s. Many good decisions have been made. Receiving bodies tended to prefer the Department to make decisions rather than semi-State agencies that subsequently took over responsibility in some areas. However, I agree decisions were made more in the style of the 1950s than the new millennium. We are now trying to implement systems so there is much greater transparency as to how the process is carried out. We have been most assiduous in trying to have an open, transparent and fair system.

I envisage the dormant accounts fund being administered according to very strict criteria that would not be changed unless something proved to be stupid. One has to have discretion in terms of the Department's Vote. We could debate the matter ad nauseam but Departments in general have to run and work towards clear criteria. However, they must also have an ability to deal with the unexpected, such as a problem where an employee in a voluntary body was not very efficient which resulted in the body running into financial trouble. I speak about the Department, not the fund, which is one-off money.

Does one close down such a body? The Department should have the ability to deal with such cases; the dormant accounts fund should not bail them out. The fund should be used to do things which are clearly additional, that are not done by the State system. I refer to such areas as disability, educational disadvantage and social and economic disadvantage. The schemes should be fairly rigid and fixed.

In cases where people get into trouble, it would be at the discretion of the Department to deal with them. I speak in the wider sense, as Departments must work to criteria. However, there should be some facility within those criteria to deal with unexpected matters and human frailty, not within the Department but outside it.

We are all aware of community groups which took on employees but it did not work out. We have plenty of small groups with one or two employees. If the head employee is not very effective and leaves after six months he or she often leaves a mess behind. I cannot say that was tough luck to that community. The Department should have discretion to make tricky decisions, with which I believe all sides of the House would agree, especially if a group has dealt with its problems. I do not envisage the dormant accounts fund being used in that way. It should be applied in a very strict and focused way that is clearly additional. If that is not the case, the dormant accounts board would certainly have the upper hand on us. The one point that has been forgotten is that the board is not going away, it will remain in place and it will be able to exert a significant moral authority if what we say here is not complied with to the letter of the law.

I recall this same debate taking place in regard to An Coimisinéir Teanga and the Ombudsman. People said they would have no power. I count up the Ombudsman's complaints to my Department because it does not please us when complaints are made to the Ombudsman. If they are upheld we feel it points to a system's failure on our part. Similarly, if the board were to come back with a stinker of a report that would reflect badly on the political system.