Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am meeting people all of the time who are asking me if we have nothing better to do. We have hospital overruns. I am blue in the face talking about the search and rescue service. We have problems in An Garda Síochána and the Defence Forces. We have problems in education. What we should be talking about in here, and I would ask the Acting Leader to consider putting this forward for debate, is an amendment to the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 through which we can start to hold people responsible for decisions that are made. The system in the country we live in is such that if something goes wrong, the Minister gets fired but the people who advised that Minister do not get fired. I ask that we spend some time considering how we bring accountability to this Parliament. We have a number of extremely powerful Secretaries General who are refusing to appear before Oireachtas joint committees. That has to stop. Accountability is important. Let us hold the public service to account. Let us hold individual Departments to account. If there are difficulties between political parties, let SIPO deal with that.