I think that the amendment should still be accepted. It is essential that a job of this kind which will have to be done in a very different way from the way it was done in the past should be done by somebody who has experience of business and of independent financial activity outside the public service. The duties which devolve on the registrar, particularly in his capacity as registrar of building societies and to a lesser extent in his capacity as registrar of industrial and provident societies are duties of enormous importance where on his own initiative, he would have to take many important steps in relation to these very large and significant bodies. I think he should have the freedom to take those steps which nonmembership of the public service would give him and he should not be beholden to the Minister of the day or any Minister at any time in carrying out those functions.
He should be free to carry them out in the public interest and in the interest, in the case of building societies, of depositors and borrowers and, in the case of industrial and provident societies, of the shareholders in those enormous co-ops, their suppliers, customers and creditors. The job envisaged for this official for the future is very different from the purely mechanical recording function which he has only had to exercise up to now. As I mentioned in the debate yesterday on the motion to establish a committee to deal with semi-State bodies, there is a growing tendency in recent months to try to subsume those hitherto independent bodies under the wings of various appropriate Departments, a tendency I deplore.
It is particularly evident in the Department of Industry and Commerce where the recent appointments to the chairmanship of the board of the IDA and the chairmanship of the board of CTT have indicated a major change of policy which, in my view, is undesirable. I think there is a reflection of it here to some extent in an unwillingness to give a guarantee that an officer of the Minister will not be appointed to a job which patently calls for independence of the Minister. No matter what the calibre of the man concerned is, if he is an officer of the Minister he cannot exercise and be seen to exercise the kind of independence one would feel is essential in a position such as this.