I want to raise a few points on the general Estimate. First, I should like to suggest to the Minister that changes in the order of Estimates cause unnecessary inconvenience and give unnecessary trouble when one is trying to trace where the various Estimates are. This year, for example, the Department of Agriculture moved from No. 27 to No. 49. It had been No. 27 for ages and I cannot see what the point of the change was or why it was introduced.
I think it is also time that rates of pay were set out on the proper, modern scales and not on the old basis. The rates, I know, are set out in the sub-heads to the various individual Estimates but the rates that are set out in the preface in Page IX in the beginning, are the old rates which have been varied down the years by each different award. The same pattern is followed on Page X and I think also the standardisation in the amendments is set out on page VII. Would it not be better that the actual amalgamations that there are of the various pay orders would be published not merely as they are shown to have been made through the years, but that they would be actually published at the rates which are applicable on pages IX and X?
I have always wondered why the sub-heads were set out as they are. I have the greatest difficulty in making sure that I am comparing like with like and I have always forgotten to ask why. If the Minister looks at any sub-head of any Estimate he will see that the number of civil servants in the Department or in the section of the Department is set out and, in the first column, it is the number that were there in the preceding year; in the second column it is the number that is there in the current year. But then, when we go over to the cost of those, on the right hand side of the particular page we find that the order is reversed and in consequence of that very frequently when people try to compare cost with cost, confusion arises. I cannot see what was the reason for switching the columns around. I suppose it has probably come down from some hallowed Treasury minute of many years ago.
It seems to me it would be much easier to have the same basis for both and I think it would be worth considering changing this in the future. The Volume of Estimates has become so complicated now that anything that can be done to simplify reference to it is worth doing.
I do not propose to make any general observations on the Minister's Department except in regard to the subject that was touched on the other day in the discussion on the Ministers and Secretaries Bill. The Minister for Finance is the Minister most concerned with State companies partly because, in relation to some of them, he has the specific statutory power of appointing directors and partly because he, by reason of his shareholding, elects the directors otherwise. I want to put it to the Minister that very different considerations should apply in regard to existing directors and new directors. Unless there is a most specific reason which the Minister is prepared to justify in this House I think it is not desirable that when a director's term, the term for which he was originally elected on appointment, comes to an end he should not be reappointed.
The method that has been adopted by the Minister during the current year of not reappointing certain directors of certain concerns, merely because they happen to have been originally appointed by another Government, does not add to his credit and certainly will not inure to the efficiency of the service of the boards of these companies.
It is quite clear that we shall not be able to get people of the calibre and standard that everybody would wish to act as directors of State companies if they are to be removed for no other reason whatever except that the Minister feels they were appointed by another Government and therefore he should remove them. We had considerable public discussion about that last year in relation to the Chairman of the Agricultural Credit Corporation. The Chairman, who was the first President of Macra na Feirme, was removed simply and solely because the Minister wanted to put in a political pal of his own. We had another case in relation to the Sugar Company where a place was found in that way for an ex-Fianna Fáil Deputy. I am making no comment about him personally at all. The first Chairman of the Young Farmers was removed and not reappointed to make way for that new appointee.
I had frankly hoped that that system was changed when two appointments to the Industrial Credit Company were made in the Spring of this year and in respect of which everybody would agree they were excellent appointments. But I was appalled to discover recently in relation to another State company that a man who, in the particular sector of the economy in which that State company operates, is justly recognised as being in the forefront, was not reappointed by the Minister. He is a man who has had not merely success in his own business in that line of country but who, by his achievements, has brought very great honour and profit to the country.
When his term of office came to an end in the ordinary way he did not even get from the Minister the ordinary civil letter of thanks for his service that anybody would be entitled to receive. He did not even receive from the Minister a notification that the Minister was sorry he could not reappoint him. The secretary of the company concerned received from an official in the Department of Finance merely a formal notification that at the meeting Mr. So-and-So was to be appointed a director; and the director who had acted for three years, and given of his time and trouble to a manner and a degree that would be many thousand times the director's fee in that concern, was not even told by the Minister for Finance or by anyone on his behalf that he was not to be reappointed in the ordinary manner. I think that was discourtesy to a shocking degree and I think—I have no complaint whatever about the person appointed subsequently—it is a practice that will mean we shall not get for our State-sponsored companies the type of man we want if they are to continue to operate in any sector of the economy.
I hope the Minister will turn back the files and see that, when I was there, I reappointed many people who, I knew when doing so, were Fianna Fáil. They had been appointed by previous Governments but I thought they were competent for their jobs and reappointed them as a matter of principle. There can be no question whatever—none—of the competency of the man I had in mind. He is outstandingly competent but merely because he was appointed by the then Minister for Agriculture, Deputy Dillon, and myself, he has been thrown overboard by the present Minister for Finance. That will not make for continuity in policy; it will not make for the prestige of the company concerned and it certainly will not make for the prestige of the Government or of the House.