Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. Like other Senators, I support the Minister and this Bill. As I was coming to the House I heard Senator Whelan refer to Chinese walls. There is a story that one law firm in Dublin has so many Chinese walls that we can also see it from outer space. I do not believe in Chinese walls any more than Senator Whelan does.
It is interesting that President Obama is on the same page as the Minister, or vice versa, and that he introduced lobbying rules when he came to office to control gifts - we have that more or less under control - as well as the revolving door ban. When I served on the Brennan commission on the health service, the chairman was most insistent that we put a stop to having in doctors' offices goods or items provided by drug companies. We have to raise the standards all around in public and private life. The control of lobbying to which the Minister aspires in this Bill is absolutely essential.
There is an economic argument that people like William Baumol have put. He maintains this is a waste of entrepreneurial effort. We have no wish to see two people competing for the Minister's attention or for the attention of the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan. They should go off and compete with each other. That is what entrepreneurship should be about. Baumol calls it directly unproductive entrepreneurship and vast amounts of resources are spent in this area. By one account, in the United States over a 12 year period some $29 trillion was spent on lobbying. Estimates of the number of lobbyists - frequently they are lawyers - in Washington run between 12,500 and 15,000. That represents absolute waste, except that they are chiselling out of the tax code, regulation and the public expenditure budget items for themselves. I suppose if the Government share of GDP grows, that kind of development is inevitable.
We have come across examples already in the banking inquiry. There were pressures to prevent the development of a code of corporate governance in the financial sector in the mid 2000s, in other words, three years before the thing collapsed. The establishment of a code of conduct for directors was successfully resisted as a result of the banks putting pressure on the Department of Finance. Some people knew that these reforms were needed. They saw that the crisis was going to happen and tried to impose stronger standards but they were lobbied away from it.
All correspondence and meetings should be recorded. This includes not only representations or formal lobbyist communications but meetings at squash clubs and golf clubs, which have been mentioned already. In public life we have to serve the public and keep a good distance - I imagine it is increasingly the habit - from the tobacco industry, to which Senator Norris referred.

I feel an annual despair when I see the Finance Bill coming before the House because one can nearly say who wrote each section - a tax break for the property sector and a tax break for somebody else. It is particularly worrying when many of the people who drew up the tax breaks go through the revolving door after a few years to work for tax lawyers and accountants - the fiscal termites as Vito Tanzi calls them in a book. Why do Governments have so much difficulty balancing the books? It is because the tax base is being eroded by the activities of these tax lawyers and accountants. Of course, the expenditure base is increased because of their success in lobbying. I recall President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is probably not thought of as the most radical of men, worrying about the growth of the military-industrial complex. Finance, the health sector - which has given the US one of the most expensive health services in the world - and business account for over half of the enormous amount of lobbying we have described here. What the Minister is attempting to do is most important and he certainly has support on these benches.

We need a requirement to write it down. One of the problems the banking inquiry faces is a culture of not writing things down. We want to know what the discussions were, who was there and who proposed the motion. The representative bodies are not always members of the boy scouts movement. Of course, it is the job of IBEC to make the case for industry, the job of the IFA to make the case for agriculture and the job of the Construction Industry Federation to make the case for construction. We have mentioned the lawyers and accountants. If they all succeed, the welfare of the rest of society will be substantially reduced because we are faced with tax bills that we cannot afford.

In general, what the Minister is trying to do is important. Section 6 lists people like Deputies, Senators, those at Secretary General and Assistant Secretary level in the Civil Service and equivalent levels in local authorities. What about the quangos? Should they be covered in respect of people who lobby them? I recall the taxi regulator's office being occupied by people who did not like her policies on taxi regulation. Much power resides in quangos and many representations are made to them. Perhaps the Minister might consider if that merits his attention.

The Minister is obviously going in the right direction and I think he has the support of the House. This is not good for democracy. We ought to know everybody who comes in here and into Government Buildings and make representation as public as possible. The success of some of the lobbyists in presenting what we could see were bogus arguments means that we need a strong Government economic service - a cause close to the Minister's heart - so it can say "no personal affront guys, that last representation you had would have cost the public about ten times as much as your members would have benefited and, therefore, we're not doing it". Robbing Peter to pay Paul usually gets the support of Paul and his public relations company, tax accountant and lawyer but we in Parliament represent society as a whole and we need stronger resistance to those kinds of pressures. This Bill is a notable step forward in that direction and deserves the support of everybody in this House.