Noel Ahern (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)

The trend, therefore, has been to align them with what is deemed to be current best practice. We appear to be at the beginning of another wave of life now where we are questioning the value of agencies and considering amalgamating some of them. It may well be that in 20 years the public representative will again be king, all decisions will be made by Ministers and there will be public representatives on all boards. Perhaps these things are like clothes fashions and go around in circles. However, these recommendations have come through a series of consultancy reports and are now part of Government policy.

Where a number of local authorities have an interest in a particular port company, it is intended that the Minister will rotate the local authority directorship as appropriate. The mechanism by which that will be done has not been finalised but, in a case such as Waterford port, if historically there was a member from each authority, it would be reasonable to have a mechanism whereby that directorship would be rotated, provided the involvement of all three local authorities was equal. It might be different if one local authority had a peripheral involvement historically. However, if an authority had a recognised role, it would be common sense to try to rotate that directorship or at least give the authorities some recognition for their traditional role.