This is a Bill dealing with the question of extern Ministers, and the proposal is to provide greater elasticity for the President of the Executive Council than now exists in the matter of the selection of colleagues who will share with him responsibility for policy and for administration generally to the Dáil and to the electorate. I take the view that on the day the Dáil elects the President of the Executive Council there is vested in him executive responsibility for the various departments. He proceeds to share and apportion out that responsibility amongst colleagues of his own selection, whose names he submits for approval to the Dáil. At present he is limited to the number of persons whom he can call into the political group, and which has collective responsibility before the Dáil and before the electorate. It is sought in this Bill to increase the maximum membership of the Executive Council from 7, at which it now stands, up to a possible 12. That leaves it open to the President to take into the Executive Council, to call into collective responsibility, as many as 11 Ministers. He is not bound to call in that number. He may leave certain departments unfilled by himself to be filled by the act of the Dáil and to be administered as a matter of single responsibility in the way that four departments are now administered. But what is sought is latitude, elasticity, so that the newly-elected President of the Executive Council may base his decision on the circumstances which he finds confronting him after he has been elected to that position. It may be, too, that our experience of the working of the extern Minister idea has led us to think that it is not as valuable a constitutional idea as we once thought it would be.
It would be the ideal thing in Deputy Johnson's ideal State which is run without money. Where it breaks down is that every Department radiates into the Department of Finance, and that while theoretically one may say this Minister has single responsibility to the Dáil and to the country for his Department he does not share responsibility with the Executive Council nor they with him. Still, inasmuch as every one of them has to turn to the Minister for Finance for the funds to implement— if I may use that horrible word—his policy, collective responsibility comes in there. All Departments radiate into the Department, which must necessarily be within the Executive Council—the Department of Finance—so that this single responsibility of extern Ministers is, I will not say entirely, but largely theoretical, and this aloofness of such Ministers from the Executive Council and its works and pomps is largely theoretical. They have to turn to the Finance Department, and there is collective responsibility for that Department. At any rate, we feel that each succeeding President of the Executive Council, facing the position as he finds it on the day of his own election, should have a free hand to decide how much of the administration of the country, how many of the Departments of State he will make the subject of collective responsibility, to be shared by him and his colleagues of the Executive Council, and how much, if any, he will leave outside that Executive Council as Departments to be administered in single responsibility way by the Ministers whom we have come to call extern Ministers.
At present there are outside the Executive Council some very important Departments—the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Local Government, the Department of Fisheries and the Department of Posts and Telegraphs—and it may be thought it scarcely a wise thing that in a country so predominantly agricultural as this the Department of Agriculture should be administered without collective responsibility on the part of the Government as a whole. Local Government is a very important phase of the life of the country, and there might be much to be said for collective responsibility in that respect, but we are not attempting here to draw straight lines, to say this shall be so or this shall not be so. What we do recommend to the Dáil is a free hand for the President of the Executive Council to decide how large his Council shall be, and for how many Departments he, together with his colleagues, shall assume political responsibility. We recommend that, if he thought fit, he should be free to take collective responsibility within the Executive Council for all the Departments of State, or facing his political exigencies to leave one or two or three Departments outside the Executive Council. We consider that it is a matter the President ought not to be hampered in, and we seek a freer hand for him within the Constitution than he is allowed as it stands.