I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
This is a Bill of unusual importance for Members who, for however long they have had the privilege of being elected to this House, spend long working days here and it is important also to the electorate. All of us who serve as Ministers in different Departments develop our own distinct perspectives on the Dáil, the Seanad and the organisation that supports the Houses, but a Minister for Finance probably gets a differently shaded view.
I did not fully realise the extent to which matters of day to day housekeeping affecting these Houses ended up on the timetable of the Minister for Finance. This may seem like an odd admission from a former Opposition spokesman on Finance. However, I am not talking about the "front of house" exercises such as introducing Estimates for the Houses or answering parliamentary questions. While of critical importance, they are merely the visible tip of a much bigger iceberg. Oireachtas Members, or groups of Members, frequently state that they are not given the back up facilities, including staff, that they need to do their work. The result is a regular patter of parliamentarian feet towards the door of the Minister for Finance, either on these premises or what they sometimes see as enemy territory in Upper Merrion Street. What I propose to do through this Bill is to make that journey totally unnecessary because, on the kind of matters I mentioned and on much more besides, the buck will stop with the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission.
The Title of this Bill deserves some explanation. We in this House, and people generally, often use a kind of shorthand when referring to this place – Leinster House, the Oireachtas, Par liament, the Legislature, etc. The Houses of the Oireachtas Commission is a bit of a mouthful for ordinary conversation but there are times when we have to go for precision and the Title of this body must be precise. It cannot be the Oireachtas Commission because the Oireachtas consists of the President as well as the Dáil and Seanad. What we are concerned with in this Bill is the administrative machine which provides the back-up of essential services to serve and sustain these Houses and their Members in discharging their public functions. The Bill also provides for the financial process which keeps that machine oiled and which generates the various services utilised by Members.
The essence of this Bill is that it provides for the Houses of the Oireachtas to be headed up by a Commission composed, with the exception of the Secretary General, of Members of this House and the Seanad, endowing them with an enhanced version of the powers vested in Ministers who have charge of Departments. More fundamentally, it provides the Commission with the financial resources, the upper limit to be specified in the Bill, to run that office and the financial affairs of the Houses for some years without having to come to the Minister for Finance or the Government.
This scenario would replace the process which has applied to funding Oireachtas activities since the foundation of the State. Currently, the annual Estimate for the Office is introduced by the Minister for Finance and debated in this House in the same way as Estimates for other public services, with the expenditure being subject to controls and approvals by the Minister in much the same way as expenditure on Departments and Offices of State generally. Where complaints arose about this process they tended to relate to restrictions on budgets for new services or the expansion of existing services – much the same matters that involve the Minister for Finance and his Department in intermittent spats with other Ministers and their officials. More recently, complaints sometimes centred on the one obvious difference in the Estimates process between the Office of the Houses of the Oireachtas and spending Departments. They had Ministers who could line up early with their officials to argue against particular cuts proposed by Finance and, if business was not done, the Minister responsible for the Department could argue his or her case at the appropriate Government meeting.
Members felt at a disadvantage when making a case for additional resources at Estimates time because they are ultimately dependent on the Minister for Finance promoting their side, often possibly against official proposals in his own Department, and to be their voice at the Government meeting which determined the allocations. Successive Ministers have been conscious of the constitutional independence of the Oireachtas when dealing with the Office. In practice, they were sympathetic to demands from the Office and reflected this as much as circumstances allowed in the approach they took to requests for extra resources, although at times of necessity stringent cuts were made there as in other services. Procedures were established under which a specially designated group of Members met the Minister of the day to tease out and prioritise proposed expenditure. Recently, however, there was a change in the character of the criticism. Obtaining approval always took time and refusals were irksome, but in a faster-moving environment it has become a greater source of annoyance. There was also a concern that it is not appropriate that the Executive should control the resources of Parliament, the body charged with holding the Executive to account. The Bill addresses the traditional criticisms, but it does more than that. It is a practical response to the new conditions affecting these Houses and their Members and a recognition of new requirements and the evolution of new relationships between parliamentarians and Ministers or the organisations they head.