A very few weeks ago the Minister for Health, in person, signed a contract for certain works to be carried out on the site of the proposed Dublin regional sanatorium. The Minister has refused to disclose to the Dáil and to the public the precise contract sum to be paid in respect of these works. He has indicated, however, that it is in the neighbourhood of £100,000. It is of first importance to keep in mind, in connection with this matter, one terrific fact. The money for this contract, whether it be for £100,000 or £200,000, will not be provided by a Vote of the Oireachtas but will be taken from a fund, a trust fund, a public fund, which is under the absolute control of the Minister himself.
Where the establishment of a sanatorium is concerned, the Minister's, as perhaps Deputies know, power of disposal over this fund is absolute. The law provides that if the Minister directs the Hospitals Trust Board to provide moneys for the establishment of a sanatorium the board must comply with his direction. It cannot, under the law, do otherwise. No matter how ill-judged it may deem it, it cannot question the Minister's direction. It cannot appeal to the Government or to the Oireachtas or to the public to have it varied in any way. The Hospitals Trust Board must do what the Minister directs it to do. Moreover, expenditure from the Hospitals Trust Fund is not subject to examination by the Comptroller and Auditor-General—a great safeguard which the public have that public moneys will not be misused or embezzled or in any way put to any dishonest or corrupt purpose. Neither the Comptroller and Auditor-General nor any other officer of the Oireachtas, nor even of the State, has power to say whether the expenditure which the Minister directs shall be defrayed out of the Hospitals Trust Fund has been honestly incurred or not. Not even the courts can investigate a question of this kind. In fact, there would seem to be no machinery to check or control any misfeasance or malfeasance that a careless or dishonest Minister might be guilty of—except one thing, to which I shall refer in due course. Thus, if he were so minded, a dishonest Minister, by specially favouring his friends in a matter of contracts, could misuse the Hospitals Trust moneys. If, instead of being meticulously careful to ensure that due value was given for expenditure, he were to place contracts with high tenderers instead of with tenderers who would do the work well for a lower tender, he could mulct the Hospitals Trust Fund with absolute impunity.
There is but one safeguard against such rank dishonesty or stupid carelessness and that is the readiness of the individual who is the Minister in charge of the funds for the time being to give to Deputies, and through them to the public, the fullest information regarding any transaction involving the moneys of the fund to which he has been a party. Hitherto, that safeguard has been an effective one. Hitherto, no Minister has refused to answer any question addressed to him in relation to any action of his which involved expenditure from the fund. The present Minister is the first to break that salutary and essential rule.
The question which I addressed to the Minister for Health last Wednesday should have been easy to answer. It asked for no more information than should have been readily available to me. Any man of prudence, signing a contract for £1,000—let alone £100,000 —would have satisfied himself in advance in regard to every one of the points which were raised in that question. In regard to the question, let me say that, so far as I have been able to learn, the firm concerned in this contract is a firm of high standing and reputation. I did not know its name when I put down the question nor was the question inspired by any other desire than to ascertain whether the Minister was the rubber stamp which he held himself out to be to Deputy Bartley—the automation signing on the dotted line when his technical officers told him to do so—or whether he was, in fact, the effective head of his Department; whether, in short, he was the dead-head and the dummy, as he has professed himself to be in this House, or an active director bringing an independent intelligence to bear on the proposals submitted to him for decision by the civil servants whom he is supposed to lead and inspire and control.
I gather that the Minister, with a humility that is generally found in greater men, desires to number himself with the dead-heads and the dummies and, for that reason, wished to shuffle out of the responsibility which is constitutionally his. That is the great and momentous issue which the Minister's evasive and misleading reply to my question has raised. It was because of the attitude which the Minister took up in that regard that I felt it imperative in the public interest to raise this matter on the Adjournment. To my mind, the Minister's proclaimed position in regard to this matter overshadows every other aspect of it. The Minister, under the Constitution, is responsible to Dáil Éireann for everything that he does in his Department and for everything that every officer of his does in that Department.
Yet, what was the purport of the Minister's reply to my question but to try to shift the burden of his constitutional responsibilities from his own shoulders to those of his officers, his servants and his subordinates? The people who are supposed to do what he tells them to do are the people who, he proclaimed, compel him to do what they tell him to do. "My technical advisers," he said—and the reference is column 1213, Volume 118 of the Official Report of the Dáil Debates—"made a certain recommendation to me and I acted upon that recommendation". Did ever a Minister in this House utter such a preposterous excuse? If I have done wrong, he said, in effect, it was those wicked persons, my technical officers, who made me do it. I am not saying—and I want to be emphatic about this— that the Minister has done wrong in signing this contract. He has given me no information which would lead me to come to that conclusion. Neither has he given any information to the public, which is the one safeguard they have that, in the case of a Minister vested with such absolute control as the present Minister enjoys, that position will not be abused by whoever may happen to be, for the time being, the occupant of this office.
I do not want to be taken either as suggesting that the Minister is a person who would do wrong. I am putting the position to him in this personal way so that he may realise, once and for all, the injury which I believe he has done to the public interest by the attitude which he took up in framing that reply to my question. I do not say that the Minister, let me repeat has done wrong, but let the Minister know, if he has done wrong, the Constitution will not permit him to hide behind his officers and neither will the country. The Constitution does not say that public servants, whether they be technical advisers or administrators, are responsible to Dáil Éireann for the acts of the Minister. It says, on the contrary, quite the opposite. It says that the Minister is responsible to the Dáil and the country for the acts of his officers. The country did not elect the technical advisers, behind whose broad backs the Minister tries to shelter, to this House. The majority in this House did not make any one of the Minister's technical advisers Minister for Health. The country elected the Minister——