Brendan Ryan (Labour)

There is no evidence the secretary was appointed by Willy Brandt, who made it clear he did nothing wrong but said he should have known and was responsible. It is often difficult to get through to the Government that the position of Minister is one of responsibility. Many people think it is about glory but it is about responsibility, to which I will refer later.

The Minister stated the first lesson to be learned from the report was not to ignore legal advice. None of us could avoid the question of ignoring legal advice. The real advice to give to Ministers is to identify that for which one is responsible. Ministers are responsible for legal, constitutional and financial issues. Those are the three major ones that I can see. It is a reasonable expectation that any Minister in Government would not wait to be told that there is a problem. The Minister should ask whether there are problems of which he or she should be aware. That is what taking responsibility is about. If the Minister lacks the initiative and managerial enterprise to ask what are the problems of the Department, passing over responsibility and saying that it is not his fault because he was not told, he is not accepting responsibility. The job of a Minister is not simply to take credit or accept glory, although it is nice when that happens; it is to take responsibility.

We have an extraordinary situation in our political system where very large amounts of work are done by Government quangos, and Members of the Oireachtas cannot question Ministers about decisions made by a whole range of bodies. I assume that the HSE falls into that category. However, every major piece of good news from all those agencies will still be announced by a Minister who is not responsible for their decisions. Let us make up our minds once and for all in this country. Either Ministers are responsible, in which case they are responsible for everything, or they are not, in which case they should butt out and leave such decisions to the relevant agencies. For Ministers to claim the glory while denying the responsibility is to make a mockery of the whole idea of political accountability. That is what is going on here.

I am tempted to quote the wonderful, flowery language of the former Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Martin, when he was talking about someone else in Government, but it would take up too much time. Suffice to say that members of Fianna Fáil in Opposition are capable of using language that no one in this House has used today about Deputy Martin's position. They used extraordinary language about a far less significant issue, important though it was — the administrative failure of a judge in the Special Criminal Court. They used astonishing language about his incompetence, all of which amounted to saying that one could not blame the Civil Service for the Minister's responsibility. Suddenly, in Government, we have the opposite. Fianna Fáil discover that it is not the Minister's fault at all but that of someone else, since he was not informed of the problem. The logic defies me. I wonder about the Government and Ministers. Before someone else says it, I know that I will die wondering.