Dan Boyle (Green Party)

The legislation is technical in nature and is the third such allocation of a triennial budget to the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission since it came into being with the 2003 Act. The House needs to be run and there is an onus on us to ensure the appropriate budget is given. It being frozen for the period 2010 to 2012, as opposed to the three-year period just passed, on the surface seems to be responsible given the budgetary constraints at the moment. The 2012 budget will be on average the same as the 2007 budget. Given that decisions are pending and may be made next week when the Minister for Finance delivers his Budget Statement, there is an onus on us to speak about the cost of the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission and how we can reduce the cost as much as possible.

Some of the debates and discussions over the past 18 months, particularly regarding Members' expenses, have not been handled well by the commission. This has not helped the perception of politics and politicians outside this House. I would like to see the commission being more proactive in this area, not only in terms of the amount given for expenses but the manner in which they are given. Proposals are being considered by the Minister for Finance in this regard. It seems strange to me that the system of travel expenses rewards Members of these Houses and members of the Civil Service for having a bigger car. As long as we have expenses that encourage people to be wasteful, we will waste public resources. In passing legislation such as this, if we do not make these points and see these changes happening, our credibility is lessened.

There are other issues about how the commission is operating. I agree with Senator O'Toole in respect of transparency. The minutes of the commission are made available but they are very anodyne and relate to decisions. We should raise questions about the commission meeting in public as much as possible. The commission is responsible for the affairs of the ultimate public bodies in this country. We should seek an open and transparent culture within the commission.

Due to the grouping arrangements and membership of the commission, there are questions about how representative it is. For example, there is only one female member on the commission. The Green Party and Sinn Féin have no representatives and the Independents find it very difficult to be represented on the commission. The composition of the commission must be seriously examined. Given that this is the third triennial budget, we must have a valuation process of whether the stand-alone Houses of the Oireachtas Commission is better than the previous system of allocation from the Department of Finance. It is taken as a given that we should run our own affairs and that this is the best mechanism to do so. Major questions have been raised about the first two tranches of funding and whether they have been used effectively. It seems to represent how public expenditure has gone out of control in this country. If we cannot show we are running the Houses of the Oireachtas in the most efficient way, it raises a credibility issue about gaining public confidence on whether we can run the public finances in a credible way.

I did not intend to be so negative in dealing with what is a technical Bill but the debate on Second Stage gives us the opportunity to ask questions that we rarely ask and that, for cultural reasons, we would prefer were not asked in public. For those reasons we should ask these questions and seek the answers.

The sincere commitment of those who have served and are serving on the commission is to try to deliver the best possible services. Elements of the Houses are run very well and would be a good example of how other things in society and in the public economy should run. The debate on Second Stage should be used as an opportunity to give congratulations on this.

Another point regarding the costs of the commission may cause dissent. This has nothing to do with the fact that my party is not represented on the commission. We must examine the stipend that attaches to being a member of the commission for representing the Houses of the Oireachtas when other committees do similar work. There is additional work for members of the commission but the context of 2004 is very different from the context of 2010. These measures must be examined strenuously.

I support this Bill. I ask that the qualifications I am raising be examined in the context of how the commission runs its affairs over the next few years. Given the current climate and in freezing the budget for the next triennial period, the expectation should be that the budget will not be fully used. In a culture where we try to spend the maximum and overspend on budgets, it would be a good signal if we found ourselves in 2012 having spent less than what was allocated in this Bill.