Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 30 Nov 1949

Vol. 118 No. 11

Army Pensions (Increase) Bill, 1949. - Adjournment Debate—Dublin Sanatorium Contract.

Mr. MacEntee

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——

A Deputy

Hear, hear!

Mr. MacEntee

——and having elected the Minister—I hope the Deputy will say "hear, hear" to this— it expects him to stand up to his responsibilities like a man.

A Deputy

Hear, hear!

Mr. O'Leary

He will not let it down the drain.

Mr. MacEntee

There are other aspects of the Minister's reply that I also regard as being very reprehensible and to which I wish to refer. His reply was not only evasive, not only a refusal to give that full information which, as I have shown, is the only safeguard that the public have that the Hospitals Trust Fund will be honestly and rightfully used; it was grossly misleading and it wound up with a piece of gratuitous and calculated impertinence. Here I should like to emphasise also that I do not believe that the Minister's advisers, either technical or administrative, were responsible for all the features of that reply, certainly not for those of them to which I am going to refer. They smacked too much of the beggar on horesback to have been provided by a public servant who had a right conception of what is due by him to the Oireachtas and the elected representatives of the people.

The Minister stated that it is not the practice to disclose the precise amount of any tender. Has the Minister ever read The Irish Builder or any other reputable journal which caters for engineers, architects or other persons engaged in constructional work? Did he ever read the Irish Times in the days when that paper used to feature reports of contracts and tendered prices, or did he ever read the local Press? Does not everybody know that contract prices are frequently published? Is there a member of a local authority who is not aware of the fact that if he asks his county manager to give him information in relation to any business of that local authority involving a contract, that the county manager is bound to give it in full to any member of that council and, if necessary, to have it published in the public Press?

Yet the Minister tells us that it is not the practice to disclose tenders. Does not everybody know that, so far from its being advisable to keep contract prices secret, it is, on the contrary, highly desirable that they should be published so as to ensure that the contracts are honestly placed? What other means have the public to ensure that a tender, which would give them the best value for their money, has been accepted, except this, that if a person has put in a lower tender than that which has been accepted, he can challenge the acceptance of the higher tender and put the person responsible for accepting that higher tender on proof to show that he has acted in good faith and in the best interests of the persons who will have to pay when the work is finished?

With regard to the other information for which I asked, the Minister states that it may be obtained in the Companies Registration Office. I am aware of that. I did not ask this information for my own use. I have nothing to gain privately by securing it. I asked it for the public benefit and so that the public might be assured that at least there was an Opposition alert to prevent any abuses growing up in a matter of this kind. It is information which is readily available to the Minister. It is information which is relevant to the question which I have been discussing. It is information which the Government has in its possession and it relates to a contract which the Government or the Minister has placed. It is information which concerns the conduct of the Minister in his public office. It is information for which, as a Deputy of Dáil Éireann, I had a right to ask and was entitled to ask. When in discharge of what I consider to be my public duty I did ask for it, these circumstances should have been present to the mind of the Minister and however difficult it may have been for him to recognise his obligations under the Constitution, he should have discharged his responsibility and given me the information I asked for in my question.

Minister for Health (Dr. Browne)

May I say how much I admire the tremendous éclat, the attitude of doubt, the façade of uncertainty which Deputy MacEntee has brought into a rather simple and very uncomplicated question? It is satisfying to know that Deputy MacEntee is at last taking a real interest in matters such as the building of sanatoria. I am sure the House will agree with me that his conversion to an interest in the needs of institutions and the expeditious provision of institutions such as sanatoria is very long overdue and is a very salutary conversion for which, to a certain extent, I hope I may claim a little credit.

There were a number of points raised by the Deputy which I shall treat as serious points for his benefit and the benefit of the House. I am fully aware of my responsibilities to this House. I am acutely aware of my responsibilities to the people who elected me to this House and placed me in this very privileged position. I am particularly aware of my responsibilities to those amongst them who may be sick. Consequently, I have felt that my primary responsibility was to alleviate the conditions of those people and to attempt, to the best of my ability, to overcome the very serious and considerable arrears which had been left to me to a large extent by the Deputy who has just spoken.

The most important consideration is, of course, the provision of beds in the minimum of time. This has been the dominating consideration in my control of the Department of Health to date, because I know that in the provision of bed accommodation, time certainly may mean health and, in many cases, may even mean lives. Consequently, my attitude in relation to contracts and the placing of tenders has been and will be, as long as I am Minister, not that of the bureaucrat or a mind entwined and entangled in what is commonly called red tape, but to attempt to give the Government Departments and the men who work in these Departments an opportunity to show that they can compete with any private individual or private firm in the carrying out of any work. Therefore, in the placing of contracts, the considerations which I bear in mind are to get a first-class quality job done in the minimum of time. These two points entail certain considerations. First of all, I do not necessarily award the contract to the lowest tenderer. Neither do I award the contract to what is ostensibly, from the point of view of weeks stated, the fastest tender. The considerations which are borne in mind by my advisers when presenting a case to me for each particular contractor are: the reputation of that contractor in my Department or any of the other Departments of State of any other large firms, the availability of equipment, the quality and quantity of equipment, the financial stability of the company, the resources of that company generally, and, of course, the cost of the particular job. All these points are weighed carefully. The case for and against each contractor is put to me by my advisers. I consider the points raised by them and, if I am satisfied that the points raised by them are reasonable and sound, then I accept the recommendation which they make in relation to the placing of the contract, as I have done in this case.

I cannot pretend that, in relation to matters generally in my Department, I invariably accept the recommendation of my advisers, nor, of course, do I give any guarantee that I will do it in the future. In this particular case I did accept their recommendation.

Deputy MacEntee has asked a number of questions and was extremely indignant because information was not supplied in relation to the points raised. If the Deputy had been a newcomer to this House, it might have been reasonable for him to say that I was acting outside precedent. There are precedents for the attitude which I have adopted, precedents accepted on this side of the House and by the members of Deputy MacEntee's own Party when they were the Government. These precedents were established by the present President, Mr. Seán T. O'Kelly, when he was Minister for Finance, Deputy Moylan when he was Minister for Lands, and Deputy Traynor when he was Minister for Defence when questions and matters such as this relating to contracts and the size of them arose. Deputy MacEntee made the point that I would not disclose this information and, by my action, was attempting to conceal it. It is outside my power to conceal this information. As I pointed out, that information is readily available to him or any other Deputy in the company's office.

This company is an Irish company, as it happens. The majority of the shares are held by Irish nationals. It is a very reputable company, as the Deputy has pointed out, and from the financial point of view has carried out one contract which was twice as large as the one it is carrying out at present. This is a purely civil engineering job and any works which the company has carried out were largely civil engineering works. I am quite satisfied with the reputation which it holds and also as to its financial stability.

As I have said, I accepted in this case the advice of my advisers. In the last two years we have had a very hard and testing time in my Department during which I have had every opportunity of considering the qualities of those men—the engineers, the architects and the administrative staff—and I am quite satisfied as a result of my experience of them that the advice which they have tendered to me is excellent advice and it is advice over which I am prepared to stand. Of course, I am in no way attempting to hide myself behind the broad shoulders of my technical officers. In this case and in all cases I make the final decision.

The Dáil adjourned at 11 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Thursday, December 1st.