Aideen Hayden (Labour)

I also welcome the Minister of State and his comments on the way forward with this Bill. There is a mechanism whereby we can keep the door open on it. That is a progressive way to do it.

From a personal perspective, I serve with Senator Sean D. Barrett on the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform. He is a credit to this House and that committee. Without being overdramatic, he is not a drama queen of the economics world in the way certain other economists are. I welcome everything he has to say; he is a thoughtful and thought provoking individual who has a great deal of common sense to offer. I would give more than a passing nod to anything he puts before the House. I thank him personally for the work he put into this significant legislation. It should be acknowledged by the House that this is incredible work that he has brought before the House. Not only is the Bill incredible work but the explanatory memorandum is also incredible. Even with the Senator's explanations, I still need a dictionary of economics to dissect the memorandum.

This discussion is significant because it deals with transparency in decision making. Those of us engaged in public life must be conscious that we are standing at a crossroads in political life. Unfortunately, in the past in political life a lot revolved around the lack of transparency and involved clientilism in smoky rooms in which decisions were made in dark corners in order that the ordinary man in the street would not know what was happening. We are, at least, in spite of everything in the current crisis, in a scenario where most people are talking about the decisions being taken in the European Union and by the Government. We have become a society in which economic decisions are not subject of articles on the back pages of The Irish Times but are being discussed in every house. We must move forward in the way we engage democratically with economic thought.

Whatever Bill we adopt, be it the Government legislation in March or Senator Sean D. Barrett's Bill — I hope we end up with an amalgam of the two — I hope we will end up with a much more open, democratic and transparent system that moves away from clientilism and that will allow us to determine the decisions made by parties in certain circumstances. We would then have real choices between parties and policies such as tax and spend. There must not be the under the counter decisions we had in the past.