Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The House and Irish society are indebted to the Minister for accepting the Bill and to Senators Crown, Daly and van Turnhout for working on it; to Shane Kenneally, who inspired it; and to Fionn O’Callaghan, for bringing the matter directly to the Taoiseach and for coming up here to speak about it. Is it not a matter for reflection, as Senator Daly said, that this Bill, on which we are all agreed, has taken so long? Recently a letter went AWOL in the Department of Justice and Equality for 15 days. We really have to question this. We were all elected on a reform agenda. Is the system of governance - the machinery - able to respond, even when we are all agreed? It needs reform. The Government might pay attention to that in the remaining two years it has to serve. We need reform of governance to speed up the process, particularly when we are all agreed. Parliament needs to assert itself. It seems to have come about that the permanent government decides the priorities and we are just a nuisance. That is a negation of everything we will celebrate in the centenary of 1916 and of the earlier Irish parliamentary tradition of Grattan and O’Connell, praised by Her Majesty the Queen of England last week. We have to assert our role in serving the people. They can give us our walking papers very quickly. The permanent government has to respond when Parliament requires things to be done, and this most desirable and very attractive measure has taken far too long to get onto the Statute Book. I hope there will be no further delay.

The question we must all ask ourselves as Members of this Parliament is what prevents us from carrying out reforms in the whole area of governance across the board, because this country proved to be ungovernable between 2008 and 2010, when it had to be rescued by the IMF. We have not reformed the permanent government enough. We are still firefighting in so many fields. Perhaps the ban on recruitment has meant that there is no new talent in the permanent government coming up with ideas. The people who were here when the country crashed in 2008 are still in charge. That is serious. What has happened in this Bill raises issues about how the permanent government operates. I appreciate the difficulties Ministers have. They have explained how hard it is to get legislation through Departments and the parliamentary draftsman. We have to address this because the pace of reform is not fast enough. Given the trouble we got into a few years ago, we have to reform the system to ensure that never happens again.