Déirdre de Búrca (Green Party)

I welcome the Minister to the House and the opportunity to make statements on FÁS. To put my statement in context, FÁS is an extremely important agency in this State and, given the economic downturn, its role will be all the more important for this State. It is our national training and employment authority. It has had an overseas budget of €1 billion and an advertising budget of €9 million to date. It is charged with anticipating the needs of the 2 million strong labour force in Ireland. It operates training and employment programmes, a recruitment service to jobseekers and employers and an advisory service for industry, and it supports community-based enterprises. It is divided into eight regions.

As other speakers have done, I pay tribute to the very good work FÁS does on the ground. It runs some excellent courses and provides important services, both for jobseekers and employers, and it should be commended on that, but in view of the downturn, its role will become all the more important and critical, given some of the challenges we will face in the coming years, particularly in the area of retraining and upskilling unemployed workers.

I welcome the Minister's announcement of the additional €5 million allocated for the training of the unemployed and the additional €4 million that will subsidise the employment of redundant apprentices in 2009. I welcome also the fact that there is a clear policy in place to deal with redundancies and company closures.

I suggest that an emerging green economy could provide an excellent opportunity for FÁS in terms of the types of programmes and retraining opportunities it would provide for people who find themselves unemployed. For example, there will be a major emphasis on insulating buildings, energy efficiency and retrofitting old buildings. Many individuals could be trained to carry out that important work. There is a growing public demand for the installation of alternative energy heating systems and we need to train the required number of people to do that. There are major opportunities in that area.

In the area of recycling, we are aware that recycling markets are collapsing around the world and we find, as a country that has been used to exporting many of our materials for recycling, we are having to store that material here. We should examine the possibility of developing indigenous recycling industries where we can provide both training and employment opportunities in those emerging industries. These are areas on which FÁS should concentrate in the coming years.

I would not like to miss the opportunity, because the public expect it of us, of commenting on the recent controversy that has erupted regarding what one might call the expenses scandal in FÁS. It is disappointing and concerning to see the information that has come into the public domain about spending practices in FÁS. When we talk about spending practices we mean, as other speakers have pointed out, taxpayers' money that has been spent in a way that can only be judged as extravagant and unacceptable.

We hear of stories about first-class flights that on occasion were not cancelled when the Government jet was used instead. We hear about golf trips to Florida, beauty salon treatments, fine dining and chauffeur driven cars. That is a world away from the world of FÁS trainees and apprentices and it appears to suggest, particularly at the top level of FÁS, that there was a loss of focus on the management of FÁS. There is a sense that people imagined they were working somewhere else and had these expense accounts that they could run up without any real thought about the implications for taxpayers of having their money spent in this way, rather than on what was supposed to be the organisation's core responsibilities.

The details of that lavish spending have caused outrage among the public. Senator Shane Ross must be congratulated on the investigative work he did to uncover the evidence of that inappropriate and extravagant spending. It was pointed out that €5.7 million of public money was spent in 2007 alone. When that figure is broken down, that is the equivalent of more than €2,500 on travel and subsistence claims for each of FÁS's 2,200 staff. A total of €643,000 was spent on transatlantic travel in the past four years. Questions must be asked about that. The FÁS science Florida programme has attracted about 60 students a year since 2003. Many of those programmes lasted for ten days, yet when we examine much of the transatlantic travel, we see it was to Florida. We must question the value for money that was provided for the taxpayers of the country.

Last week, the chief executive of FÁS resigned. It is the view of the Green Party that that was right and proper action for the chief executive. He had to take responsibility for the disclosures that were coming out on spending within the organisation. I welcome the fact that Mr. Molloy will appear before the Committee of Public Accounts. That is right and proper. However, it is the view of the Green Party that the FÁS board should consider its position at this point. Governance and oversight of the organisation has been very unsatisfactory and for that reason the board members should consider their positions.

It is realistic to expect that the media and public focus will now move to other public bodies and there will be similar scrutiny of the spending practices in many semi-State agencies and bodies. I hope those agencies and bodies will be willing to have their expense and spending practices subject to an open audit. That will be necessary to bolster public confidence and I hope all information will be provided. It should not be left to people to make expensive freedom of information requests to access that information.

Our conduct as public representatives will also be under scrutiny in terms of our expenditure and expenses. We need to be as fully transparent as possible and show that we are using taxpayers' money in a responsible way, particularly in these difficult times when we are calling on the public generally to tighten their belts, be much more frugal and accept the cutbacks that will be inevitable in the coming years.

We should consider a major efficiencies and cost saving drive across the Houses of the Oireachtas. If we do that in a time when we are calling on the public to live with the cutbacks and the much tighter fiscal position in which we find ourselves, we will have much greater credibility. All of us should be seen to tighten our belts and live up to the same standards we are asking of other people.