Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Minister's statutory right needs to be preserved, with which the Senator will not disagree, but I want to be crystal clear that the Haddington Road agreement will be fully protected by the Government and it is fully protected in this legislation. However, we are crafting a law that will have duration well beyond 2016, the expiry date of the agreement. There might be cases in which the Minister might well need to act in preserving the public purse or dealing with other issues and it must be the right of the Minister who has statutory responsibility for the public service and pay to have that authority ultimately. However, I assure the Senator and the House that the Haddington Road agreement and all other collective agreements will be fully protected by the Government.

I should not be drawn into discussing the notion of decentralisation which affected my own constituency. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government was supposed to move wholly to Wexford, abandoning the Custom House. We got a few hundred people and there were many volunteers, but the problem was that they were not all from that Department. The policy which we terminated as soon we entered government broke the collective memory and wisdom of Departments because new Departments were created. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government was to be formed with anybody who wished to transfer to Wexford, while the Department of Justice and Equality was to be formed by those who wished to move to another location. That was crazy. The corporate memory and ability of Departments to carry out their functions would have been hugely damaged by that policy. However, that debate is over.