Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Leaving aside the politics, let us consider the recommendations. When I looked at them on page 93, my jaw dropped. Most of what is recommended about how to run a decent organisation could have been written by a first year student of business studies. Did it really need €2 billion, or at least hundreds of millions of euro of taxpayers' money for the Department to go astray? We do not know the exact figure, so we should not exaggerate it. Money taken from people is now being paid back. Did it really take that to happen for us to be presented with such recommendations? They include the following: that Governments should get the legal basis for decisions right; that there should be an analytical capability in a Department; that there should be transparency — we all approve of that; that there should be records; that there should be some capacity to assess risk; that a proper system of recording decisions should be in place; that we should have some way of identifying which issues are important; and that we should have an understanding of issues of political sensitivity. I will not go through them all, since I do not have time.

For God's sake, we are spending almost €40 billion a year through Government bodies, yet I am now told that those things were not self-evident to those running the Departments. On this I am deliberately trying to avoid being party political. It is mind-boggling that it might be so and I blame politicians for that, since they are responsible for how Departments are run. They may not want to do it or accept it. Civil servants are supposed to do what the Minister wants and assist the Minister in that regard. If the Minister does not want to make Departments work properly, all those things are left out.

I am flabbergasted by these recommendations. It is always a good idea to look at recommendations in reports. I thought that I was going to see high-flown, serious material. Instead, as I said, I found what were almost schoolboy or schoolgirl ideas, so self-evidently true that it is astonishing they are not already in place.

I would like someone to answer this question. Is there now a Government decision that these recommendations will be implemented, not just in the Department of Health and Children but in every Department? The response should be nothing less than that. If there is a lesson to be learnt for the future, it is that those are necessary conditions for any sense of good governance. Are there any other time bombs waiting to explode in other Departments? Has every Secretary General been asked whether there are issues similar to this in scale or potential consequence in his or her Department? If they have not been asked, why not? I would like to know if that has happened.

The intricacy with which Ministers and Departments use language has always fascinated me, and the Department of Health and Children is still holding on to dubious interpretations of the distinction between entitlement and eligibility. It did so in the teeth of conclusions drawn by the Ombudsman in 2001. The Department is still disputing what other people took to be the meaning of the words "entitlement" and "eligibility". It invites a ministerial decision, since Ministers cannot have been aware of that.

I return to the famous meeting in the Gresham Hotel; something about it fascinates me. The reason the Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Deputy Martin, is being criticised and has been invited to consider his position is that he is the only former Minister for Health and Children still in Government. What I say would apply to any Minister who had been there long enough to have been culpable in the way in which I believe Deputy Martin was. What could he have done? In the 2001 health strategy, for instance, there is, as I am sure Members are aware, the intriguing phrase, "eligibility arrangements will be simplified". It states:

The Ombudsman has drawn attention to the uncertainty surrounding the eligibility of older people for long-term residential care. Clarification of entitlement in this regard will be given particular attention in the general review of legislation on entitlement.

How did that get into the 2001 health strategy without some discussion of who would pay for it? I do not care how it is clouded politically. How did it get into a document that went through Cabinet and was approved? How did such a reference get in without someone somewhere asking what it would cost and who would pay?

Then there was the Ombudsman's report of 2001, in which he clearly drew attention to those anomalies. How did that happen? The only conclusion to which one can come is that there are conflicts of recollection between the Secretary General and the Minister. I say no more than that; I do not believe that either of them is the kind of person who would tell lies. It has never been my style to accuse people of that. How did the then Minister process the decision to issue medical cards to everybody over 70, a decision that I have publicly supported on many occasions, without him or the Department of Finance asking how much it would cost? How is it possible that all this history never arose in the process of making that decision? That is a mind-boggling picture of incompetent decision-making for which the Minister is responsible.

The Minister says he cannot be responsible for what is not drawn to his attention. I said on the Order of Business this morning, and I repeat it now, that if that is the picture of a Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment that will be conveyed to chief executives of multinational companies, a Minister who says he is not responsible because nobody told him about it, Ireland will suffer. Most of the CEOs of those multinationals, if something of this scale happened, would lose their jobs on the spot, not because nobody told them but because they did not have the wit and the nous to ask. That is the fundamental question. There has been too much talk about what the Secretary General told the Minister. The fundamental question is the reason the Minister did not ask questions that were obvious to other people and the only conclusion one can come to is that the Minister did not ask those questions in that period because he did not want to know the answers. That is an abnegation of responsibility and it is the reason he should resign.