Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I move amendment No. 1:

After "enacted." to add the following:

"Conscious of various staffing embargoes and concerned about the lack of qualified and experienced personnel available to the Government and the Civil Service, in areas such as banking, bond markets, global economic models, financial instruments, credit rating and related functions, Seanad Éireann calls on the Government to outline the current arrangements and proposals for the proper recruitment, retention and conditions of service of such personnel.".

I welcome the motion and I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I will endeavour presently to build the bridge asked for by Senator Boyle. It is important to recognise there is nothing new about this and I support him in this regard. Some years back when I was working on a related matter, I looked at the Capitol Hill booklet which includes precisely this requirement. There must be a year's gardening leave prior to taking up another position. There is nothing new about this and nothing that any fair-minded person could raise with it. The only questions I have on the wording of the motion concern the membership of the outside appointments board and why politicians are excluded. It is somewhat unbalanced if a senior civil servant can be made subject to certain conditions governing his or her move into a conflicting position but Ministers cannot. Perhaps that is intended and I look forward to hearing the answer to that question.

The fact that the amendment is in the form of an addendum means I do not have a problem with the motion. That goes without saying. It is very clear. It is not just about bringing in experts but also about experts leaving. I ask the Green Party to think about one point. If the motion is agreed, we would put in place a certain set of procedures for somebody who might gain certain information and then move into a position of a conflict of interest. The same applies to somebody from a specialist interest group who works in a Department for a short time on a temporary basis, on the inside of a Chinese wall, as it were, in budgeting, finance or whatever, finishes his or her contract and moves out. That is why my amendment contains the phrase "outline the current arrangements and proposals ... and conditions of service of such personnel". It is equally important in that situation.

One cannot have a person coming in the door with a whole set of skills, which are welcome, learning a whole new insight into what is happening and then leaving and selling his or her wares to the opposition. There is nothing new about this; I have raised it many times. My colleague, Senator Ross, tabled a motion on this some years ago. Nothing has been left unsaid. We need a certain level of complementary staff. It is not about people leaving; it also about people coming in. It also raises questions about people in senior positions who have retired from a Department being brought in as consultants to work for a period of time. That needs to be covered, and that is why our amendment does exactly that.

We have to ensure there is fairness, openness and transparency in all of these things. That is the reason for the motion. The reference the proposer made was to a situation which arose in the meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts last week. We have had many long debates in this House about the lack of certain personnel in the Department of Finance. I have the highest respect for the intellectual capacity of the members of the Department of Finance. Anything I say should not be misunderstood in any way but ties into the comments of the Secretary General of the Department last week, to which I will refer.

Apparently there were no economists in the Department at the time of the crisis. Everyone was prepared to blame the Department for that. I raised the issue but never got an answer. Why was that the case? It so happened that I knew the answer to the question. We could not afford to pay economists who had the skill sets we wanted to stay in the public sector and we had no way around that. They all leaked to the private sector. The point of my amendment is to ensure we can reverse the situation and address how we can bring a skill set back from the private sector if we want to do that.

We need to have a way of doing that, and not in the ad hoc manner which appears to be the case at the current time. A question was asked at the meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts last week of the Secretary General of the Department of Finance, Mr. Kevin Cardiff, on the question of skills in the Department. I am not being critical of him. I welcome his statement as openness and transparency in action and on which he needs to be complimented. He said:

One of my colleagues is giving me lists of qualifications of staff in the Department which I can read out. It is a highly educated bunch, with a wide range of relevant skills and qualifications. Getting to more of the specifics, the fact of holding a particular degree in a particular discipline does not necessarily qualify you for the range of things that can arise. It is a more specific expertise, I think, the Deputy is talking about.

I completely agree with that.

I wish to emphasise another comment Mr. Cardiff made: "I do not believe the Department of Finance currently has sufficient expertise to deal with the issues at hand." It is a very fair, honest and open comment. No one else seems to think it was important. It hardly got a line. It was worthy of editorials and should have sent shivers through the Government. Is it because of embargoes in the public sector or restrictive pay arrangements in the Civil Service? If it is, I want to know about it. I tabled an amendment to the motion moved by Senator Boyle because this is a very serious matter.

Mr. Cardiff, who is the second most senior civil servant in the country and is in charge of the most important Department in the country, also said, "My personal view is that the Department needs to increase its level of specialist skills." How can we do that? We do not necessarily want someone who is an expert in a marginal, though important, area of finance to come into a full-time career in the Civil or public service. That may not be what is required.

In response to another question Mr. Cardiff said:

One matter to which the Deputy referred and in respect of which he piqued my interest is the notion of appointing a risk officer. Such an individual would operate ... there is something to the Deputy's suggestion and I will give it some consideration.

We know we had a lack of expertise when the problem hit the fan two years ago. I am not being critical of anyone. That is the reality.

We know we have expertise of a general nature in the Department, namely, people who can do what is required of them as civil servants. We have listened to the Secretary General of the Department who has said the skill set level needs to be increased. The world of finance is becoming more and more complex. Contracts for difference can be in 24 different forms and special purpose vehicles can be in a million different forms. We have to understand banking, risk assessment and management and credit rating, which we know about and which is being discussed in Europe which may set up an official European credit rating agency. All these things are happening. Where are the people to do it?

My reason for tabling the amendment cannot be questioned. I am asking Senator Boyle that we hear how the Department and the Government intend dealing with the issue. I want to hear that embargoes and current pay rates will not cut across it. I want to hear that people who leave, having been brought in on a temporary basis, will not be a risk to us in the future. I want to know the arrangements for such people in terms of their conditions of service. These are the issues. The amendment complements the motion and must be considered from that point of view. It is a very serious issue.

I will concentrate on the Department of Finance because that is from where my amendment grew. I honestly believe that if we made this one change in the Civil Service, it would transform it, release huge energy and expertise and open competition for all promoted posts in the Civil Service, which is supposed to be Green Party policy. That single change would allow civil servants, who have extraordinary intellectual ability, to fight for their places, and I have no doubt they would do so.

I am a member of the Joint Committee on Climate Change and Energy Security, which is as technical an area as any other, a point the Green Party will accept. Every aspect of it, from carbon to renewables to energy measurement, is technical. It is unfair to try to depend constantly on general civil servants to deal with that. We are waiting for a climate change Bill, a geothermal rights Bill and a foreshore licence Bill because the small cohort we have to draft legislation are busy doing other things. It should be the case that we can bring people in to do these things. The Secretary General made certain references to what he had done to deal with this. The amendment is not mischievous, rather it is an attempt to create a complementary situation to move the argument forward and examine the new scenario of flexibility of movement in and out of the public sector.

I did not touch on the issue of people on a pension who also earn a salary in the public sector, something with which I agree. Capitol Hill changed the legislation on pensions in a very complex way in order that someone could be on a pension and earning a salary while working in the same enterprise at the same time. It is something for which I asked 15 years ago and is badly needed now.