Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I second the motion and welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Paul Kehoe. I remember the first time he came to the House. We were talking about the Central Statistics Office and he praised its independence and professionalism, two good yardsticks. We will try to apply some of these criteria in this debate.

The Minister of State is sitting beside a reformer. As the counter-motion shows, the Leader has reformed the Seanad. We have had Nobel Prize winners, representatives of the Orange Order and every single MEP to link with our activities in the European Union. Some reform does take place, even if it is not often that people give the House the credit it deserves. It is capable of reforming itself and it is in capable hands in that regard.

The problem we faced in 2008 was that the country was bankrupt. The banks needed serious reform. One could ask whether the Seanad responded to this. We did. Bills Nos. 19, 21 and 24 were on the Order Paper for precisely that reason. We need much stricter rules on banking, as I fear we will get into trouble again.

Let us go back to 2.5 times the main income or 80% of the value of the property as the maximum loan. Governor Honohan has been before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform and expressed his fear that he still does not have adequate powers to deal with reckless banking. If that is still the case, it is an urgent area for reform because banking was one of the four sectors which bankrupted this country and created the political crisis that we are all here to solve. The activities of the property sector were allied to that and one must ask if we are still giving too many tax breaks to that sector. The crisis also has its roots in the activities of accountants, who prepared books for the banks which we ended up buying, at a cost of €64 billion. We will not know until after certain court cases are concluded if we now have proper regulation of that area of financial services. We have already debated with various Ministers the adequacy of our current arrangements for policing the accountancy profession. We also had failures in public administration. There were banking regulators who, in the main, moved from the Department of Finance into the Central Bank and, as we know now, did not regulate the banks. Indeed, the whole system came unstuck. Those four areas, therefore, need urgent reform. We need to have stricter regulation of banks, the property sector, accountants and financial service providers. We also need to reform the system under which the Department of Finance and the Central Bank regulate the banks and I am not convinced that we are nearly there on that. In fact, we have had discussions on various Bills but we seem to be leaving much of this up to Europe, which may not work to our advantage. Those are the sectors that got us into so much trouble and we must address them.

I wish to praise the Leader for the reforms he has brought about already. With reference to the Constitutional Convention, I am not so sure that our Constitution had much to do with the collapse of the country in 2008. I am also not sure that reducing the number of Deputies in the Dáil is appropriate because I believe we face a democratic deficit. The legislation dealing with political donations is welcome. Local government still remains heavily dominated by the county managers and we have not reformed that aspect of it very much. Many of the county managers act like semi-dictators in their own jurisdictions. We must wait and see the results of expanding the functions of the Ombudsman but there is a list of exempted organisations at the back of the Bill. Those organisations lobbied successfully to be exempt from the attentions of the Ombudsman which is not satisfactory. It remains to be seen whether the whistleblower legislation will be effective. The effectiveness of Oireachtas committees is diminished by the fact that meetings often clash with important meetings of this House which we must attend. We must wait and see how the reforms that have been implemented to date will work. We need legislation on lobbying urgently and it is a great pity that it has been delayed.

Looking back to the most recent consultation with the electorate with regard to the future of this House, I wish to say a few words as a member of the winning side. The five independent university Senators took the line against five political parties: Fine Gael, the Labour Party, Sinn Féin, People before Profit and the United Left Alliance. What did we find? First, young people voted overwhelmingly with us. They are disillusioned with the way political parties operate in this country. We won all of the student debates and told students to go home and tell their parents, grandparents and so forth to vote "No". Those who are interested in reform should reach out to young people much more than they have done heretofore. The Dublin working class gave a massive vote to us. In constituencies where not a single Deputy was in favour of the retention of this House we got between 68% and 70% of the vote. Again, reform must address why working class people, particularly in Dublin, have become alienated from the political process. The other issue I discovered among my electorate in Northern Ireland was that they were furious that they were being deprived of a vote for the Oireachtas. Many of those in the two university constituencies had no vote in the referendum.