Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

First, it is not “the Minister”; it is “a Minister of the Government”. As I said, this refers to any Minister and perhaps multiple Ministers who have instructions that they would like to send down to the agency and see implemented. Hopefully, how the agency deals with those will be appropriate. However, while the agency has a wider remit, this does not give it the right to decline to engage with a Minister’s instruction because of its remit or given the balance. The Minister of State may recall that I had an explicit amendment on Committee Stage to propose that the agency should not have to engage with schemes which will compromise its ability to deliver on its remit. That amendment was not accepted so there is no curtailment here.

To be clear, it is not standard and it was not standard when these provisions went into the HEA Act. The HEA Bill was an extraordinarily dangerously drafted Bill in terms of ministerial overreach. That was not equivalent. I have been looking at a lot of Bills in a lot of detail for close to a decade and, to be clear, the provisions that are in the HEA Act and in this Bill are not standard. The language is wider and looser, in particular in section 11.

In terms of that question of accountability to the Oireachtas committee, we may recall there is also a provision in this Bill – effectively, a gagging order provision - that says that when the CEO presents to an Oireachtas committee, they are not allowed to comment on any ministerial policy or even the potential intentions of such a policy, so they are not going to be accountable when it comes to a Minister’s or multiple Ministers’ policies that they have to implement. They are not allowed to comment on the policy or the reasons for the policy. As I said, we already have this totally inappropriate limitation of the Oireachtas committees’ powers to engage with the chief executive officer, so we do not have a check and balance here or, rather, we have a blank cheque and we do not have balance.

My greater frustration is with regard to section 11 but this is part of the whole piece. I need to mark it so that if we have issues down the line, we are clear where the problems are and that they should have been addressed.