I gave notice at Question Time that I wished to raise on the Adjournment the subject matter of Question No. 47 on today's Order Paper. As reported in volume 207, No. 3, column 489, the Minister for Education said: "I agree that I am the responsible Minister for the National Gallery." That must be established at a very early stage.
This question concerns an appointment to the vacancy for the post of Director of the National Gallery. I raised the matter on the Minister's Estimate and in my view he dealt with it completely inadequately. I am particularly shocked by the cavalier way he has dealt with this question. I believe it to be a very serious issue involving his ministerial integrity because he is, as he says here, the person ultimately responsible for the behaviour of the Governors of the National Gallery.
The Minister accused me on the previous occasion of throwing mud. That is one way of trying to suppress Deputies such as myself from bringing forward difficult matters of this kind to the House. One of the privileges we have here is the right to bring matters of this kind forward but it is a right we are given in the public interest. Whenever we feel conscientiously we have a responsibility to discharge this particular function, I do not think we should be accused of trying to throw mud. I was particularly careful in my charge to suppress the name of the person whom I believe to be involved in this because I did not want to bring it before this House. I said I would give it to the Minister if he asked for it. He has not bothered to pursue this matter and to ask who this person is.
The other person mentioned by me, I named in this House in the highest possible terms. Therefore, it is particularly disgraceful of the Minister to use this gambit in order to try to suppress full and free discussion on this issue. I may be wrong in my information but the only person who can ascertain which of us is right and which of us is wrong is the Minister and he has failed to do so.
The question concerns the appointment by the Governors of a Director of the National Gallery. An advertisement appeared in July, 1963. I have given the terms on another occasion and I do not intend to repeat them but the terms I presume were those which the Governors set out. I do not know how many Governors there are —13, 14, 15 or 16 reputable and honourable men who, the Minister says, are particularly experienced and well-qualified to judge on these things.
They decided that certain basic qualifications would turn up the right man for this particularly important job. The National Gallery, in its possessions, happens to be probably one of the greatest galleries in Europe. Equally, it has the spending of what I understand to be £500,000 under the Shaw Bequest. Therefore, this appointment is terribly important, even if we leave aside the question of the principle under which the appointment was made. Therefore, I do not think the Minister is justified, if he is conscious of his responsbility, in dealing with it in the way he has dealt with it so far.
Certain qualifications were laid down in the July advertisement. They concerned essential qualifications and desirable qualifications and a salary. I understand there was an age limit. I am not certain of this but I understand there was an age limit of 50 years.
As a result of that advertisement, I know there were two replies: I understand that there were in fact five. I understand they were all prima facie fully qualified to take on this job. If we accept as the necessary qualifications the qualifications laid down by the Board of Governors, who, the Minister says, are so responsible and knowledgeable, at least two of them answered these qualifications, Miss Crookshank and the gentleman from Liverpool. They had the necessary experience and qualifications. I am not saying either one or the other of these people should have been appointed but if two, three or four people—I understand a very distinguished American also applied—had the basic qualifications, then I think the Board should have had them in and should have interviewed them. That is not my major charge. I merely believe that that would be correct and standard practice if they were to follow the usual line of the Local Appointments Commission: I imagine that would be their general line.
These two people, I know for certain, received notice that the job was to be readvertised and assumed they were not to be appointed. No explanation was given. In the interval, my charge is that Mr. White was approached by at least two members of the Gallery. I did not indict all the members of the Gallery —only two—and I did not mention either of the names. I know one of them. Two of these people, I am told, approached Mr. White.
Mr. White is a person who, as I said before, has had two years in a tobacco company. He has no academic qualifications. He has practically little or no literary output beyond writing critiques on pictures, reviewing pictures, and so on. Otherwise, he has no special qualifications. He is Curator of the Municipal Gallery at the present moment and I think for a period of two years, he has been an energetic Curator of that Gallery. Otherwise, he has no outstanding qualifications at all. He was approached by these two people and offered the job. He refused because he said the salary was not adequate—he is perfectly within his rights in doing this—but he said he would accept for a salary of £2,500.
The next thing that happened as far as I can gather is that a further advertisement was issued in January of this year with new qualifications. The Minister made great play with the fact that the salary was increased to attract better people. I accept that. I accept it could attract better people but I also believe that, if these people are the reputable and qualified people they say they are, and the Minister holds they are, the basic qualifications laid down in the first instance should have attracted the properly qualified man at the higher salary.
No case seems to me to be made against the basic qualifications. A case has been made against the salary—I accept that—but no case has been made against the qualifications. The qualifications were altered in an interesting and, I believe, a significant way. They were altered so that, in my view, they were hand-tailored to facilitate the making of the appointment in favour of Mr. White, no matter what the alternative might be. They were hand-tailored in this way. In the first advertisement, there were no essential qualifications. The essential qualifications—Mr. White's qualifications— were (a) satisfactory experience of art gallery administration with knowledge of the care and display of pictures and (b), utterly inane it seems to me, general suitability to discharge the duties of the position and a general qualification on the subject but relatively meaning very little.
Then there were desirable qualifications which were the desirable qualications of the previous advertisement— a university degree, and so on, which Mr. White has not got. However, he has the essential qualifications. He had not another essential qualification, as far as I know, in the first advertisement. He was aged 54 or 53. In the initial advertisement, it was to be a person of 50. I am not certain of that but anyway it is interesting that the second advertisement states, for the first time, that the age candidates must be is not more than 54 on 1st February 1964.
The position then is that the age is changed; the qualifications are changed and the salary is changed. They are all changed it seems to me to make it inevitable that Mr. White will be appointed. May I say that it is Mr. White who has said this in conversation quite freely. He apparently did not see anything wrong with this and I want to repeat that I am not criticising him at all. As far as I can see, his position is completely impeccable. The fact that he was canvassed was not his fault. The fact that they are giving him these things is to his credit. He has been approached, and says that he was approached by these people, and that they offered him this post. I believe that the Governors of the Gallery have, as the Minister has, the right, if they wish to change the terms of the advertisement. A better case should have been made for changing the basic terms of the advertisement. They were not adverted to by the Minister in his reply. If these people are the people they say they are, then I believe they should have interviewed these people in the first instance, because they met the basic requirements, and secondly, they could have rejected all of them. There is no objection to that and they then could have increased the salary, altered the age limit and the essential and desirable conditions of employment.
There is one thing they should not have done if they did it, that is, interview Mr. White and offer him this post on practically any terms he liked. I am not blaming him for laying down the terms. That is my charge. That is where I believe they have behaved dishonourably. I believe they have behaved in a dishonest way. The Minister has a responsibility to investigate this charge by means of a sworn inquiry. This is a very serious thing to ask and I do not do it lightly because I know also that I am making serious charges; I know that the sworn inquiry must one day report and I know that they can discredit me in so far as they may say that the charges are unfounded. At the same time, I believe the evidence I have been given, which I believe to have been given by reputable people —and I tried to satisfy myself to the best of my ability that they were reputable people—and because of that, I have brought this matter forward here. I thought it my responsibility as a public representative to do so. I have taken considerable pains to restrict the names involved in this as far as I have been able to do so, but as far as the prima facie case against these two members of the Board is concerned, I believe that it merits an inquiry by the Minister.
If I had made this charge against the Taoiseach in regard to the Local Appointments Commission or the Civil Service Commissioners—I am a Deputy of fairly long standing and have been in a ministerial position—then in all circumstances, most Ministers in either Administrations would have said that this merits serious inquiry, followed by rebuttal, if necessary, or an establishing of the facts that I am correct. The Minister owes it to the public but above all to the members of the Board who are not a party to this. Presumably, there may be members who are not parties to what is going on. There are plenty of boards on which there are some people who are more energetic than others. There is a small cabal on most committees and conceivably there is such a cabal on this one, and that some of these Governors do not know what I am talking about. In fairness to these Governors and to the public who have to supply the money for the salaries, and in fairness, if you like, to the administration of the Shaw Bequest, which is a very considerable and generous one, it is important that the best possible person should be appointed to this position and the Minister, as Minister for Education, should take a more responsible approach to the whole question.
He has suggested that it is my practice to come in and throw mud at different people and in that regard he mentioned the College of Art. All I would like to say is that at no time did I attack the personnel of the College. I attacked the educational methods. In fact, I did not even attack them; I quoted the Swedish Design Report in regard to them, and I was accused at that time of attacking these people, which I did not do. The net result, however, is that there have been fairly radical changes in the College of Art. It is wrong for the Minister when we come in here attempting, in a bona fide way, to maintain standards, to criticise the Minister, to help the Minister in his Department, not to accept our efforts for what they are, honourable attempts, and not in any way directed towards damaging anybody's reputation within or outside this House.
I believe the Minister at this stage before the appointment was made— the last day was the second of this month—should establish some form of judicial body to inquire fully into the whole matter. I do not propose to give the name of the person who, I have been told, is responsible but I will give it to the Minister if he proposes to carry out a serious inquiry into these allegations. If they are untrue, naturally the whole thing falls to the ground; if they are true, there is a very serious state of affairs which it would not be possible to ignore.
