Liam Fitzgerald (Fianna Fail)

I would like to respond to the last point made by Senator Tuffy. Members are engaging in a degree of wild speculation about the ulterior motives which may inform the actions of a future Minister. They have suggested that such a Minister might use ill health as an excuse to remove a member of the proposed agency. Senator Brady put it cogently when he said that a Minister could not declare in a public and transparent manner that he or she was removing a certain member of the agency on the grounds of ill health if details of that ill health, which would have to be clearly causing the member of the agency to be unable to perform at a reasonable capacity, were not well known within the agency.