Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I have spoken to the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Deputy Deenihan, who is passionately supportive of the institutions in question and we will see how it plays out. If further changes are necessary, we will deal with that in due course. There are people still saying, ?Burn the quangos?. The bulk of these non-governmental organisations, however, are the agencies such as IDA Ireland, the Environmental Protection Agency and Bord Iascaigh Mhara, essential agencies which should be independent of line Departments as they are oversight agencies or agencies that sell Ireland. That is why when we drill down, the number of those we can actually do away with it is small. That is why the savings are not significant.

I am reviewing the leaders? allowance in so far as it is paid to political parties. I heard a debate in the other House on this recently. When Fine Gael and the Labour Party were last in government, we were determined to break the link between business and politics. One can see how intrusive that is in the political system in the United States when during the last presidential election the candidates spent $6 billion and when one has super packs funding political parties to a vulgar extent.

While we have not got to that level, we did have significant business interaction with politics. There was a perception that it went all the way to business influencing policy.