Amendment No. 1 in the names of Deputy O'Malley and Deputy Colley has been deemed out of order.
Bula Limited (Acquisition of Shares) Bill, 1977: Report Stage.
As you know, Sir, you communicated with me in regard to this amendment. I received your communication at lunch time only and, therefore, I have not had much opportunity to examine it. Would the Chair be kind enough to direct my attention to the Standing Order which provides it is not proper to amend the Long Title of a Bill on Report Stage?
In dealing with such matters the Chair has regard not merely to Standing Orders but also to the practices and precedents laid down by my predecessors on such matters, as Deputy Colley will know. I have already informed the Deputy in writing but I will be pleased to enlarge on the reasons now as to why amendment No. 1 has been deemed to be out of order. The amendment proposes to amend the Long Title. In accordance with practice, such amendment is proper for Committee Stage and is not appropriate for Report Stage. In addition, the provisions of the Bill, as amended in Committee, make no reference to the acquisition of the shares from a subsidiary of the Midland Bank Limited and from the legal personal representatives of Patrick Wright deceased. An amendment to the Long Title must relate to something in the Bill, as amended in Committee, so that whether on Report or, indeed, on Committee this amendment would be out of order on grounds of relevancy. I trust the Deputy will understand this.
I am very grateful to the Chair for expanding on the reasons but perhaps the Chair would bear with me while I submit to him that while the Chair, of course, is bound by precedent, or at least guided by precedent, and there is no provision to this effect in the Standing Orders, I want to point out to the Chair that we have here an unprecedented situation. Without going into the details of the amendment, I want to recall briefly that until 3rd March this year nobody on this side of the House, and possibly not even the Minister, knew that this company is now controlled by a subsidiary of the Midland Bank.
When the Minister brought in the Bill and in all the discussions that took place up to the time that was discovered on report by Deputy O'Malley from the Companies Office we were under the impression—and possibly the Minister was also—that we were dealing with a situation in which the shares in this company were controlled by Bula Holdings who held 80 per cent of the shares at the time the Minister signed the agreement. Therefore, the Long Title as introduced and accepted on the Second and Committee Stages was accepted on the basis of information then available but since then the different information to which I have referred has become available and I submit that makes it a different situation, an unprecedented one, and that precedents which would normally guide the Chair do not apply here and that in the circumstances the Chair might well reconsider the decision given in regard to this amendment since I submit that the situation arising here is unprecedented.
I have given the Deputy my reasons in writing. I have enlarged upon them now and I can only tell him that the rulings of my predecessors in such matters are that amendment of Title is proper for Committee but not for Report. I am sorry I cannot accede to the Deputy's wishes in the matter.
I appreciate that but does the Chair appreciate my point that there is no precedent for the situation with which we are faced here, that the details on which the House has been working and on the basis on which the House accepted the Long Title have now turned out to be wrong? I suggest that is something that never happened before and I urge the Chair to consider the matter in the light of that. I appreciate that the Chair has considered the position, that advice has been tendered to him but I also suggest that the Chair and his advisers would not contend that they are infallible and secondly that the situation to which I have drawn attention was almost certainly not given consideration by the Chair or his advisers in arriving at the decision that has been made. That is why I am putting the point now and urging the Chair to consider the matter in the light of the submission I have made which I think is incontrovertible.
There is no ambiguity or doubt in my mind as to the relevancy of this amendment. It is clear to me that it is out of order.
But——
Deputy Lalor and the House will appreciate that rulings of the Chair on such matters may not be the subject of debate.
I do not want to debate the ruling of the Chair. I am asking is it possible to recommit this Long Title? We can only have an amendment discussed on Committee Stage. The thinking behind the necessity for this amendment arose only after this section had been passed in Committee. It is a completely new situation, and I do not know how the Chair can quote precedent since this is the first time we have had a situation like this where we are proposing to acquire shares in a firm which at present is possibly mainly in the hands of the Midland Bank. We contend that because we were not aware of this when the matter was taken on Committee Stage that the amendment could not then go in.
I have nothing to add to my ruling. I have explained it as well as I can and it should be clear to the House why the amendment is out of order.
Would the Chair be agreeable, in view of the fact that I have made this submission on the floor of the House—that was because I had not an opportunity before this—to consider at least postponing his decision on this so as to give him an opportunity to go into the matter in more detail and not make a final ruling on the admissibility of amendment No. 1 until he has had a further opportunity of considering the submission made to him? I imagine that the Minister would not object if the Chair were disposed to do that.
My ruling is one that has been deeply considered and I am satisfied with the correctness of it.
I am not questioning that Chair's ruling but I am questioning the relevance of the Chair's decision. Would the Chair tell us how his decision was reached? What precedent is in existence? He has stated that he has given this matter deep consideration. Where is the precedent for the Chair's ruling? On what precedence does he base his decision? I should have thought that in the circumstances this Dáil should make its own precedent because I understand no precedent has been created in the lifetime of this Dáil to give the Chair authority to arrive at the conclusion at which he has arrived in relation to his decision in this matter. On what precedent is the Chair basing his decision? It certainly does not arise out of Standing Orders.
I have explained the reasons for my ruling. I do not intend to elaborate further. My ruling may not be questioned now. If Deputies require further elaboration, my office will be happy to provide it for them. I shall not allow my rulings to be challenged by way of debate.
I am not challenging them. We conduct the business of this Dáil in public and I do not intend to enter into any discussion with the Chair's office on the matter. This is the place to discuss rulings of the Chair and no place else. I have asked, as I understand Deputy Colley and Deputy Lalor have asked, on what precedent this decision is based.
I have already told the House that my predecessors have ruled on a number of occasions that amendment to the Title of a Bill is proper for Committee Stage only, not for Report.
This is why I made the suggestion that the Chair might consider postponing——
I do not think that we should enter into argument.
I suggest again that there is no precedent for this; there could not be. There cannot be a precedent for the situation which has arisen here. If the Chair insists on making the ruling now and not giving it any further consideration I suggest Deputy Andrew's question is a reasonable one: what is the precedent for the decision? I understand the Chair may be in some difficulty in producing a precedent immediately and that is one of the reasons I suggested that perhaps the Chair would reconsider——
I think the Chair has done as much as can be expected. He has given reasons for his decision in writing and he has given them again to the House. It is not proper to challenge the rulings of the Chair in this manner. If the ruling of the Chair is to be challenged there is a procedure laid down in Standing Orders of which Deputies may avail.
We are not challenging the ruling of the Chair or attempting in any way to subvert the authority of the Chair. We are trying to elicit from the Chair the precedent on which he has based his decision. This is not a challenge to the Chair either in his authority as Chairman of the House or in any personal way. I should not like the Chair to take the matter personally but this is a farreaching amendment in every respect and it seems unfair from our point of view that the Chair should not give the reason or the precedent on which his decision is based.
I have given the essential reasons to the House.
They do not appear to stand up to scrutiny.
You have not, that is the difficulty. You have referred to precedents but I am suggesting there is no precedent for this and, therefore, we are entitled to ask on what precedent is the Chair relying?
Precedents are contained in the rulings of the Chair and are, I understand, available to the Opposition.
Is there any case of which the Chair is aware in which circumstances like this have arisen?
The Deputy will appreciate that I do not have these matters directly before me——
I appreciate that and that is why I made my suggestion.
——and the Chair is at a disadvantage.
I appreciate that but, in the circumstances, would the Chair consider my suggestion that, with the agreement of the House, his decision on amendment No. 1 might be postponed in order to give him an opportunity to look further into the submissions made and, if such is available, to lay his hand on the particular precedent which would relate to this?
The Chair says he is at a disadvantage and we can appreciate that but by definition the House is at a very grevious disadvantage.
Without affecting the ruling, I will have the point made by Deputy Colley investigated further.
I appreciate that but suppose, on investigation, it transpires that my submission is correct, have we not missed the boat at that stage?
We would then facilitate the Deputy and the decision would be changed.
Thank you, Sir. In what way would the Chair propose to communicate with me having investigated this?
As soon as I get an opportunity to investigate it.
Thank you.
Amendment No. 2. Amendment No. 4 is an alternative and if the House so agrees, I suggest that amendments Nos. 2 and 4 be taken together with separate decisions if required.
I would find it difficult to agree to amendments Nos. 2 and 4 being taken together. While there is similarity, there is some distinction between them. Therefore, I would be unable to agree to their being taken together.
Very well.
I move amendment No. 2:
In page 2, line 13, before "agreement" where it secondly occurs, to insert "secret".
As a result of this amendment, section 1 would read:
In this Act—
"The Agreement" means the secret agreement dated the 12th day of December, 1975 ...
It is very important for the record that it be clearly shown that the Houses of the Oireachtas were not aware of the contents of the agreement referred to in section 1. I have no doubt that in due course the transaction which is the subject of this Bill will have considerable importance one way or an other. It is important, therefore, that there be no ambiguity in the record. The primary record, of course, will be this Bill, which will then be the Act. It should be clear on the fact of the measure that the agreement referred to was not disclosed to the Members of the Oireachtas.
It is also important in that context that the President should be aware of the fact that this is a secret agreement, which was not produced to the Oireachtas, before he signs the Bill. Even more important, the courts should be aware of the situation. I say "more important" because under our legal system the courts cannot have regard to anything other than what would be in the Act coming before them. They cannot have regard to the various arguments put forward in this House. They are confined to the actual contents of the Bill. They cannot have regard for what the French call the travaux preparatoires.
It is important that we understand clearly that there is no precedent for what is being done in this Bill. There is no precedent for bringing in a Bill referring repeatedly to an agreement which has not been produced to the House or laid on the table of the House. Less there be any doubt about that, I would like to refer to what went on in previous proceedings. In the Official Report for the 2nd February, 1977, at columns 747-748 we find the following:
Mr. Colley: Could the Minister direct the attention of the House to any precedent of any Act passed by the House referring to an agreement, in the way this Bill does, where the agreement was not produced?
Mr. Keating: I cannot do that at this moment. It may be an appropriate point to raise when we come to the next Stage of the Bill. I will endeavour to furnish an answer then. I cannot do it at this moment.
Mr. Colley: Does the Minister appreciate that in view of the very heated argument which there was on this point that it would be appropriate that he would at this stage be in a position to refer to such a precedent if it existed? If it does not exist does it not invalidate the whole argument he was making? What is he covering up?
Mr. Keating: The position is as I have stated. This is a point which can be dealt with later on in the proceedings of the House.
Mr. O'Malley: There is no precedent.
That was said at the conclusion of the Second Stage. On Committee Stage that exchange was referred to and the Minister was asked then to produce a precedent but he did not do so. Referring to that, I am reported in the Official Report for the 8th February, 1977, at column 1008 as follows:
We come now to the next Stage. The first amendment before the House deals with this point and in all the Minister has to say he could not refer to one precedent for this Bill.
There is no precedent—and I suggest the evidence is now incontrovertible. The point has been raised on Second Stage and on the Committee Stage repeatedly, and the Minister has been unable to produce any precedent. I think we may take it as admitted that there is no precedent. That being so, this question arises: if this Bill is passed with no disclosure on its face that it is an unprecedented Bill, with no disclosure on its face that the agreement referred to in the Bill has been concealed from the Members of the Oireachtas, and if the matter is brought before a court be it the High Court or the Supreme Court, as can well happen —then I submit that the court will be misled because the fact of this concealment will not have been disclosed to the court. As I pointed out, the courts will be confined to what appears on the face of the Bill and will not be entitled to rely on anything said in this House in the course of the debate. It is therefore important, when we have a Bill which is unprecedented in this respect and which may have to go to the courts, that we realise that we owe it to the courts to ensure that if they are asked to consider the Bill they will be enabled to be aware of the fact that this agreement was not produced to the Members of the Oireachtas.
In practice, we may take it that the Minister has acknowledged there is no precedent. Nevertheless, he and his colleagues have tried to confuse the issue somewhat, to confuse two separate things: on the one hand, the initial investment by the State and, on the other, the day-to-day working of a State company or any company in which the State has an interest. They are two quite distinct things.
In most cases the disclosure of the day-to-day working of any company in which the State has an interest could be damaging and one would hesitate to disclose the day-to-day working of such companies. But that is quite separate and distinct from the details of the terms of the State's initial investment in any company. Despite the fact that these things are separate and distinct, heroic efforts were made by the Minister and some of his colleagues to try to pretend that they are the same thing, on the basis that because it was widely acknowledged that since one would not seek to disclose the day-to-day working of these companies one would not disclose the initial investment of the State. The fact is there has been no case advanced for the nondisclosure of the State's initial investment in this or any other company.
Another line taken by the Minister was that in adopting this attitude he was following established practice. Of course he was not. We on this side repeatedly challenged him on this. He relied very much on IDA cases in general and he referred to one IDA case in particular and said that it would be not alone damaging but that it had never been done, that there was never a case in which information of this kind was disclosed in regard to arrangements between the IDA and the companies with which they were dealing. We on this side repeatedly challenged the Minister to produce one case in respect of which the IDA, having made some agreement or some investment, had refused disclosure of the details of the investment. Despite these repeated requests the Minister failed to produce any such case, even in general terms. The Minister, I suggest, has been merely trying to confuse the issue, suggesting that his action here was in line with the traditional attitudes of successive Governments.
We have pointed out repeatedly that the attitude has been that there should not be a disclosure of the commercial working, normally the day-to-day working, of a company, but it could be more than that. The fact is nobody has attempted to justify the claim that the disclosure of the terms of the State's investment in this company would be commercially damaging. We went further than that and on Committee Stage I pointed out that I could not visualise circumstances in which the disclosures of the terms of State investment could be damaging to the commercial interests of the company. I suggested that it was not beyond the bounds of human ingenuity to devise a method whereby the Minister could make the necessary disclosures without public disclosure.
I suggest again that the onus is clearly on the Minister to show that disclosure of this information concerning the terms of the State investment in this company would be damaging to the company and, until he has so shown, the obligation rests on him at least to disclose what the danger is, even if he cannot tell us the terms on which the investment should be made. He has not attempted to give us even a very general example of the manner in which disclosure could be dangerous. His failure clearly makes it all the more necessary to show on the face of the Bill that this is a secret agreement as far as this House is concerned.
The Minister's alleged precedents in relation to the IDA do not exist. When he was challenged on that he could not produce any precedents. The fact is that no Minister of any Government in the history of the State has ever sought to do what the Minister is doing in this Bill. If that is so—and I believe it to be incontrovertible that it is so—then surely the least we can do is record some indication of the unprecedented nature of what the Minister is doing in the Bill. One way it can be done, perhaps not a very adequate way, is by accepting this amendment which would indicate on the face of the Bill that the agreement referred to is a secret agreement. Considerable responsibility is going to be handed out in due course for the consequences of the deal involved here. The responsibility for that deal rests on the Minister certainly and on the Government generally. While one may fault the backbenchers on the Coalition side of the House for voting through a Bill without knowing the terms of the agreement referred to, nevertheless, the full responsibility for the consequences of this deal have to rest on the shoulders of the Minister and of his colleagues. There is one place where no responsibility for the consequences of this deal should even indirectly be sought to be placed and that is on the shoulders of the Deputies on this side of the House. We have sought consistently and repeatedly to get the details of the State's investment. Virtually any information we have got has been as a result of the researches and tenacity of Deputy O'Malley, not as a result of any information given by the Minister. That being so, the very least that can be done is that the Bill on its face show that, as far as this House is concerned, the Members of the Oireachtas in general were not responsible for the consequences which will flow from this transaction because they had no opportunity of seeing the agreement as the Bill stands at the moment with the definition of the agreement in the first section:
"The Agreement" means the agreement dated the 12th day of December, 1975, and made between Bula Holdings, Patrick Wright, certain other parties named in the Agreement and the Minister.
With the subsequent repeated references to the agreement in the Bill, anybody reading that Bill would naturally assume that the Oireachtas in passing the Bill approved not only of the Bill but of the agreement, because some of the sections confine the Minister to acting in accordance with the terms of the agreement.
The fact is that we do not know what is in the agreement. We do not know, if the Minister acts in accordance with the terms of the agreement, what scope he has. Since we have argued this repeatedly and have got nowhere I am not arguing that case again. What I am arguing is that, given that that is the situation, this Bill should show on its face that the Members of this House, in particular the Members on this side of the House, did not approve of that agreement because they did not know what was in it and have no responsibility whatever for the consequences which will flow, be they good or bad—and we have not much doubt as to which they are going to be. Since the matter may come before the courts, it is only reasonable that the Bill ought by its terms to show that this is a secret agreement of which the House is unaware; of which the Minister presumably knows something, though on occasions during the debate one might wonder about that; of which, presumably the other parties to the agreement know something as do, presumably, the various lending agencies from whom they have borrowed money and in respect of whom charges are registered, the latest one appearing today in the list of charges on companies in Stubb's Gazette. Some people think of Stubb's Gazette as referring to judgments. I am not referring to that, but referring to a charge in favour of the Bank of Ireland. These people presumably have seen the agreement. God knows how many other people have seen the agreement, but this House has not seen it, this House which is asked to vote through this Bill based on that agreement has been consistently refused sight of it. Is it unreasonable to ask in those circumstances that the Bill on its face should record that it is a secret agreement, secret from this House?
We are repeating many things said in great detail before. We have, since the 1st February spent 35 hours talking about a small Bill with eight sections of which the normal definitions and title take up two sections. We have had a very extensive debate, and no one can suggest that the subject matter of the Bill has not been aired very fully indeed.
Could we not?
Deputy Colley makes the point of concealment from a court. I am not a solicitor as he is, but I understand that courts are entitled to hear pleadings and it seems unthinkable that the nature, thrust and content of this debate would not be a matter which could be brought to the notice of a court. We have talked about precedents and I see no point in reiterating those arguments which are on the record of the House.
I have many Bills, as other Ministers have. Referring only to my own, I have an IDA Bill which has a pressing relationship to job creation; I have a National Board of Science and Technology Bill which everybody in science and industry in Ireland wants to see enacted; there is consumer protection legislation which everybody admits is extremely desirable; and there are other Bills of mine and other Ministers that are being held up. Nobody can argue that this Bill has not been very extensively debated.
Of the many hundreds of agreements concluded every year between the State and companies in Ireland or various commercial undertakings there are not precedents for revealing this category of undertaking. I take the word "secret" to mean something the existence of which people are not aware of. There is no doubt that people are aware of the existence of this agreement and, therefore, I cannot accept the amendment as appropriate. This is an agreement the existence of which is not a secret but it is an agreement belonging to a category of agreements of which there are very many every year, which are confidential. The Deputies opposite may wish to go through the arguments on Second Stage and on Committee Stage. For those who want to go through those arguments again the Dáil record is available. This is a public place and nothing that Deputy Colley said was not said previously at great length. Therefore, I rise to indicate that I cannot accept the amendment.
I deliberately refrained from following Deputy Colley in speaking to this amendment to await the reaction of the Minister. I find it extraordinary that the Minister should have the audacity to stand up here and talk about the amount of time already spent by this party in debating this Bill and say quite openly that no one can say the subject matter of the Bill has not been fully debated. The Minister has persuaded himself that everything has been told whereas time and time again we have pointed out the fact that we want built into the Bill by this amendment the secrecy of the agreement drawn up. The Minister's only contribution has been to deny that there is anything secret about the agreement. It has all been fully debated and there is nothing unusual in coming in here with a Bill which refers to an agreement which we contend is a secret agreement.
As Deputy Colley said, the Minister has been asked time and time again to quote the precedent and the Minister falls back on his old ploy of talking about hundreds of similar agreements drawn up by State agencies, such as the IDA. There is no precedent for what we have here in section 1. I am not quoting the Minister but he did say that, listening to the contributions from this side about those who signed this agreement with the Minister, one would get the impression that these signatories were being branded as criminals. Our chief spokesman, Deputy O'Malley, has gone out of his way on many occasions to say we have never made any such insinuation. The person whom we fault and at whom we point the finger is the Minister for Industry and Commerce.
As a former Minister for Industry and Commerce, and to use the kind of phrase the Minister for Local Government would use, I say these people claim jumped. They are not people I admire to any great extent and it is because of the manner in which they established their claim to £500,000 of this £9.5 million that I am questioning the background to the agreement. That is why I press the Minister to disclose the contents of the agreement. He does not intend to do so. On Second Stage Deputy Colley asked for the precedent whereby the Minister refused to disclose the contents of the agreement. The Minister referred to three separate advices from senior counsel and I asked him to make those advices available to us so that we could refer to them. That request was ignored.
I am unhappy because the Minister allowed things to proceed as they did resulting in the necessity for him to sit down around the table with these people in order to subscribe to and agree with what we describe as a secret agreement. The Minister says his interpretation of a secret agreement is an agreement that nobody knows anything about and he is opposed to our amendment on the basis that this is not a secret agreement because everyone knows about it. The Anglo-Irish Free Trade Area Agreement was not a secret agreement because everybody knew about it. We came in here with that agreement and we suffered a good deal of abuse from the then Opposition. The agreement in regard to our entry into the EEC was published.
Here we have a section dealing with a secret agreement. This is something that has never happened in legislation in the history of this State until now. The Minister has complained about the delaying tactics of the Opposition and our unreasonableness in asking him to let us in on the secret. Were we not unreasonable in this regard we could have a Consumer Bill and a Science and Technology Bill. Fair dues to him, he did not have the audacity or the neck to tell us we could have a Mergers and Monopolies Bill. He drew the line there.
(Dublin Central): Because it would be too embarrassing for him.
I am afraid I must disagree with the Deputy. It would be impossible to embarrass the Minister. He might have some other reaction but certainly it would not be embarrassment. Some four years ago I introduced the Bill dealing with Mergers and Monopolies. The Minister is dealing with that in the same way that he is dealing with the cost of living. He is doing nothing. Is the Minister holding back in case he will not be able to effect a merger between Tara, Bula and the Government?
The behaviour of the principals of Bula during the past five years has been such that I am worried about any agreement between the Government and the company. At one point during our debate on this Bill I thought we had reached the stage where the Minister had seen the light and was willing to put the agreement before the House. We adjourned one evening but I found on reading the newspapers next morning that the managing director of Bula had cracked the whip and said it would affect the business interests of the firm. Once again, this strengthened the hand of the Minister. In that instance the managing director of Bula issued an ultimatum and he made a public statement that it would be very wrong for the Minister to disclose the contents of the agreement. However, a few days later Deputy O'Malley was in a position to draw the attention of the Minister to the fact that this firm was not doing business according to the rules laid down by the Minister.
There has been a kid glove relationship between the Minister and the principals of Bula. This agreement was drawn up between a Minister and a company but it was done when the Minister had to fight with his back to the wall. I do not accept that in such a situation a Minister can draw up an advantageous agreement from the point of view of the State and the taxpayers. This is why at this ninth hour I join with Deputies O'Malley and Colley in appealing to the Minister to attempt to explain why we should withdraw the amendment. I would ask him even at this late stage to indicate that he is willing to put a copy of the agreement before the House.
I appreciate it is embarrassing for any Government to visualise the possibility of the Supreme Court having to consider a Bill where there is reference to a secret agreement. That implies something of a war time measure. One would not think it necessary for any Minister in a civilised country like ours to build in so much secrecy into an agreement between the Government and a private company. I cannot understand the Minister's refusal to accept our amendment. His interpretation is that it is not secret in that everybody knows about it. Is the Minister suggesting that we withdraw the amendment and submit a further one referring to the secret content of the agreement?
The Minister has said that the subject matter of this Bill has been fully debated and I agree with this to some extent. However, the content of the agreement has not been debated because we have not been able to get our hands on it. As a result of the research carried out by Deputy O'Malley, the Minister was obliged to give certain information but the real nature of the agreement has remained secret. From studying the performance of the Minister since he introduced this Bill, and indeed during the past four years, I have no confidence in him. I do not think he is able to objectively draw up and sign an advantageous agreement from the taxpayers' point of view with the four people involved in this case.
It is rather ironic that we should be discussing a Bill relating to Bula today when its equine brother falls at an early fence at Cheltenham with the possibility that it may be destroyed. It is not without significance that the Minister in his wisdom for his own protection is very unwilling to reveal the contents of the agreement between Bula and himself.
The call of the Minister, when he was in Opposition, for control of our own resources now rings very hollow when he finds himself locked into a situation, as a minority shareholder, of not having a say in anything that is happening with this company. He is right to protect his skin from his own point of view when he finds that he has squandered £9½ million of the taxpayers' money on a tax-free basis to give this firm the opportunity of transferring those funds to one of their off-shore companies. I do not blame him for wanting to keep that a secret. If he had any loyalty to the Irish people and to the Government of which he is a member he should either make it public or resign. His attitude and all his actions in relation to this Bill have been disgraceful, to say the least of it. He has made a complete mockery of the House.
We agree with the Minister that this is not a secret agreement. Probably the most junior clerk in the Bank of Ireland, the Northern Bank or the Midland Bank is aware of what is in it. It shows the contempt that this socialist Minister holds the House in when he refrains from making the contents of that agreement available to the Members of the House. Secrecy has always been the sine qua non of those who get their politics from the Russians. I have no doubt that the Minister is acting consistently in keeping this type of secret. He may nod his head but he was well-trained in that philosophy. It is no surprise to me that he is selling out the country the way he is at the moment because I expected nothing more from him.
Where does the Minister's allegiance lie? It does not appear to lie with the Irish people. I would be utterly ashamed, if I were in the Minister's position, of having conducted the type of agreement he has on behalf of the Irish people. This is a complete squandering of £9.54 million of the taxpayers' money. The Minister has the audacity to come into the House and not accept this amendment because, as he says, it is not a secret agreement. It is also interesting that the Attorney General came in a couple of days to give him some moral support. I can only describe it as moral support be-because he did not give him any other support. I envy anybody who tries to justify the actions of the Minister for Industry and Commerce.
The Minister quoted precedent and said that it has always been the practice to keep those agreements secret. We have no precedent for the fact that the Minister has entered into an agreement with a company that on the day they signed that agreement transferred 800,000 of their shares elsewhere. Who is the Minister in agreement with? Will he also tell us what is the position of Haras el Chorro SA in relation to all this? We have a right to know those facts.
The Minister has repeatedly said that we have debated this ad nauseum, that we have gone into every detail of it. As Deputy O'Malley proved the debating was very worth while because it exposed the inadequacies of the protection the Irish taxpayers have. It exposed the total lack of business appreciation the Minister brought to bear on this agreement. It also exposed that the Minister, in wanting to fill an ideological cliché, made the greatest financial error any Minister ever did. As Deputy Colley said, the people who are marching into the lobbies after him will, in the not too distant future, hang their heads in shame for what they have empowered the Minister to carry out.
I cannot understand why the Minister will not reveal to the House the terms of the agreement unless it is to cover up his own inadequacies. We had the intrusion of the Attorney General on a few occasions to try to justify some of the deeds and statements of the Minister. The Attorney General has been very wise not to associate himself too much with the Minister. Was the Minister aware on the day he signed this secret agreement with Bula that they had transferred on that day 800,000 of their shares to another company? The answer to that has a lot of significance. If he was aware of it he had an obligation to tell the House about it and not leave it to Deputy O'Malley to poke it out. If he was not aware of it, it means that he was conned up to the gills by the people he entered into an agreement of trust with.
I do not blame any businessman for trying to get the best possible deal he can for his firm but we, as representatives of the people, are a different situation. We must ensure that every deal we enter into is thoroughly investigated and researched and that, as far as possible, every penny of the taxpayers' money is protected. I submit that in this secret agreement we will find that the Minister entered into a very bad deal for the country. I ask him, even at this late stage to reveal the contents of this agreement.
In an effort to put some sort of gloss on the whole sordid affair, he is not impressing the people. If it is the position that junior clerks in the Bank of Ireland or in any other bank can become aware of the contents of this agreement surely we, as the representatives of the people, are entitled also to this information. The Minister became involved in something that he did not know much about and the consequences of which he did not anticipate. If he has no doubts in regard to the Bill why is he not prepared to insert the word "secret" or, to be exact, "semi-secret"—the definition of "secret" might prove difficult—as suggested by us? This would help the courts should they find themselves in the position of having to deliberate on the constitutionality or otherwise of the Bill.
What has happened is that the Minister, whether accidentally or deliberately, has made a mess of this whole affair. The only course open to him is to resign and make way for somebody else who can do the job properly and who will not hide behind a cloak of secrecy.
Without engaging in a long discussion on this contentious matter I wish as a Deputy who has been following discussion of the Bill both here and in the media, to express not only my concern but the concern of the people who have sent me here to represent them, in relation to the manner in which the Government have been dealing with this legislation. The amendment seeks to establish that the agreement we have been discussing for the past few weeks is a secret agreement. I consider it reasonable that the word "secret" be inserted before the word "agreement".
There are a couple of other matters which concern me in so far as the Bill is concerned. First, there is the question of the role of the people who draft the Bill vis-à-vis the role of Dáil Deputies. I am referring to the element of tension that exists, but which should not exist between civil servants and Dáil Deputies. This is an element which the Government are seeking to induct into the whole discussion. I have no wish to underrate in any way the contribution of civil servants in their service to the State. They have never been found wanting. They are people of integrity but this is not to suggest that Dáil Deputies do not possess the same qualities.
I expect that the people who drafted this Bill as well as other civil servants in the Department know what is contained in the agreement. Others, such as the shareholders in the company and the bankers concerned, must also have access to this information but the point I am making is that we are being kept in the dark in this regard. There is no precedent for such a situation. It is a situation which might be regarded as constituting a parliamentary crisis. We wish to stave off this situation and to this end we have tabled the amendment. In addition, we wish to let the people know that what we have been discussing for the past few weeks is a secret agreement and that, consequently, our contributions were related to an agreement, the terms of which were not available to us. This is a very serious situation. It raises the whole question of the right of Dáil Deputies. The crisis has arisen because of the Government's deliberate effort to ensure that the Opposition are not made aware of what is being discussed. Because of this situation the teeth have been taken out of the debate. I am confident that the terms of the agreement are known to certain Members of the House but I am equally as confident that the Deputies who will be voting for the Bill will not be aware of what they are voting for.
The other aspect of the matter which concerns me relates to the position in which the President will be placed in reaching a decision on whether the Bill should be referred to the Supreme Court in order to have it tested on the grounds of constitutionality. The President will be in the position of having to decide on whether to have certain sections of the Bill tested in this regard without having available to him, presumably, the fundamental document on which the Bill is based—the agreement. Neither will the agreement be available to this House or to the Seanad. We must assume, therefore, that should the Bill be sent to the Supreme Court it will have to be decided on there without the terms of the agreement being available. This adds up to a very serious situation.
Even at this late stage the Minister might consider accepting the Fianna Fáil amendment to clearly indicate that it is a secret agreement. Dáil Deputies find themselves in a legislative cul-de-sac. They have been asked to decide on something about which they know nothing. It is grossly unfair and unreasonable. The civil service, the banks and the parliamentary draftsmen have knowledge of the agreement and it is not my intention to under-rate their services to the State. If they have that knowledge, we as Dáil Deputies should have similar access to the agreement. Is it that we cannot be trusted, that we cannot be bound by the same rules and regulations, or is it that if the agreement becomes common knowledge as far as we are concerned we will in some way do something wrong about it or articulate a wrong point of view in relation to it? The Minister has suggested that by our continuing to discuss and seek out the terms of the agreement we are holding up other very badly needed legislation.
The Minister has not indicated to us the great urgency for this Bill and knows as well as everybody else that time can be made for any piece of urgent legislation that is required. If the Minister feels that the IDA Bill, which he indirectly suggests we are holding up and as a result we are preventing the creation of other jobs, is urgent, he can pospone this Bill for another week or two in these circumstances and bring in the IDA Bill. The Minister will find that the Opposition will co-operate very willingly in relation to the IDA Bill and there will not be any suggestion of obstruction. We give that undertaking here and now. The Minister's argument does not hold water in the context of the continuing debate in relation to the Bula Limited (Acquisition of Shares) Bill, 1977. It does not bear examination, it is a false and unfair argument.
This tension which the Minister is deliberately creating between this House and others, between the courts and the President, is totally unnecessary. It is wrong and it is creating a parliamentary crisis. There is no precedent for what is happening in relation to the Bula Bill. The Minister may say there are precedents, but he has not convincingly proved there are. The reality is that this House has been asked to pass legislation upon something of which it has no knowledge. Deputy Colley in his opening remarks during the course of the afternoon has properly suggested and articulated that when this Bill passes, we on this side of the House would like to make it clear that we have no responsibility for the passing of the Bill. Unfortunately, the Bill will be passed into law in due course and it will give no indication as to the type of opposition it met in the House. It will give no indication as to who opposed it or as to who is responsible for it. We accept no responsibility for what the Minister seeks to do in passing a secret agreement in this legislation. Some people would suggest that the type of argument made by Deputies O'Malley, Colley and others indicates that we are trying to obstruct the passage of this Bill and that we are being irresponsible in relation to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Deputies O'Malley and Colley have done a magnificent job of research in relation to this Bill without the benefit of the backup of the vast civil service machinery. They have, indeed, done their duty in relation to the responsible opposition they put forward in relation to this Bill.
I have had the privilege of being in this House for 12½ years and during the course of my membership of Dáil Éireann not once in my experience have we had to discuss anything about which we had no knowledge as we are doing now. I did not want to enter into this debate, because I am not a chartered accountant, an actuary or an economist. I feel for many reasons that my competence does not stretch to some of the deeper factors involved in any argument or discussion which arises on the Bill. The two people who led the opposition through the Bill know their business and have researched their facts. I felt that I should stand up here at some time during the course of this debate and put my point of view. I put it as a lay man with no special expertise in the matter of company law. I feel that I am expressing the views of the vast majority of our people.
People have asked me whether there is something sinister or underhand about the Bill and I have had to say that I do not know because the agreement upon which the Bill is founded is a secret agreement. It is an agreement to which I have not been privy, to which the people of Ireland have not been privy, to which certain members of the civil service have been privy, to which certain banking organisations have been a party, to which certain individuals are a party and to which the Government are a party. There seems to be an effort by the Government to be selective in who will or who will not see this agreement. It appears in these circumstances that the selection of those who would be a party to this agreement and would have knowledge of the agreement is an unfair selection. In addition to the parties to the agreement, surely Dáil Deputies as people who are involved in the passage of this legislation should know what is in the agreement. It makes sound sense. In my reasonably long membership of this Dáil nothing like this has ever happened before and in the interests of Parliamentary democracy and democracy generally, I hope a situation like this will not arise again.
In addition to creating a Parliamentary crisis it is an attack on the fundamental tenets of democracy. We are asked to pass a Bill and we have not got the remotest idea of what the agreement is about. That is why we seek to insert the word "secret" before the second mention of the agreement in the first paragraph. It is not an unreasonable amendment in all the circumstances. It would show historians that Members of the Legislature were not parties to the agreement in the sense that they had no knowledge of the agreement when they were discussing it in the context of this Bill.
I would ask the Minister even at this late stage to consider the Fianna Fáil amendment. The Attorney General might say a few considered words about the position in which the President and the Supreme Court will find themselves. How does the President decide whether he should refer the matter to the Supreme Court? How can the Supreme Court decide on the Bill if they have not got the agreement before them? Will they have it before them? Will the President have it before him? These are some of the questions which must be answered, and remain to be answered, and have not been answered either by the Minister or the Attorney General.
The Attorney General is respected in legal circles, and properly so. In the interests of democracy, in the interests of law, in the interests of jurisprudence, I hope the Attorney General will explain how these matters can be decided by the parties I have mentioned unless they have the agreement from A to Z before them. How can they make a decision about something of which they have no knowledge? When the Attorney General was in Opposition he was a strong upholder of the Dáil in relation to anything which might come before it of which it had special knowledge, or should have special knowledge. He has always defended the institution of Oireachtas Éireann. I hope he will take this opportunity to express his concern about the fact that this House is asked to pass a Bill based on an agreement of which it has no knowledge. I know he will take the opportunity either at this stage or at a later stage to clear the air. I appeal to him to do so. If he does not, to use the cliché of the Minister for Industry and Commerce, we are in a situation of an on-going parliamentary crisis.
(Dublin Central): I hope the Attorney General will clear the air with regard to the remarks made by Deputy Andrews, Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley. In my 12½ years in this House I have never seen a Bill such as the Bill we are now discussing. Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley have shown great patience and perseverance over the past four or five weeks in trying to extract from the Minister the contents of the agreement.
A Bill such as this has no significance unless we know what is in the agreement between the Minister and the other parties. I am expressing views which have been expressed to me. We know what people in the business world think about agreements and how important agreements are to them. They take time to ensure that agreements are correct. They get the right legal advice when they are purchasing property. I have been speaking to these people over the past few weeks and they posed the same questions to me as they did to Deputy Andrews. They want to know what is the agreement all about and have we seen it. They know discussing this bit of paper is of no significance unless we know the contents of the agreement.
Financing, acquisition of shares beyond 49 per cent, the money in the company and how it will be used, are of vital importance in strengthening the Minister's hand and improving his equity in acquiring more shares. We are discussing public money, some of it mine, some of it belonging to every Member of the House. This is not a small transaction involving a few thousand pounds between two partners. The investment of public money must be seen to be above board. If the Minister wants to show credibility, there must be no sign of weakness on his part. The fact that he has not revealed the contents of the agreement to Members of this House creates certain doubts in the minds of the public. Whether that is justified, I do not know. I cannot say because we have not seen the agreement.
The Minister should have arranged for some members of this party to see the agreement. We have Deputies whose integrity can be taken for granted. They have been Ministers. The Minister should have confided in them the contents of this secret agreement. It is very difficult for Deputy O'Malley and Deputy Colley to accept the Bill in its present form. It would have enhanced the Minister's reputation considerably if he had taken even some of our Deputies into his confidence but he refused to do so. No Deputy would be doing his parliamentary duty if this Bill were allowed to have a speedy passage as the Minister requested. There is too much principle involved.
The Minister said there is no precedent for revealing the agreement. This may not be in the same context, but I read in The Irish Times of an agreement between the Department of Agriculture, the Agricultural Credit Corporation and Clover Meats. There was no secrecy about that. We can study and examine the contents of the agreement and, irrespective of whether it is right or wrong, at least the public know about it. It involves public money. If it does not bear fruit, we can criticise the Minister later and he can say : “In my opinion at that time that was the right thing to do.” I admire a Minister who is prepared to come out in the open and say these things.
We are discussing this agreement in a vacuum. Over £9½ million of public money is involved. It is the duty of Deputies on both sides of the House to ensure that public money is protected. That is what Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley have been pursuing in the House over the past month or more. Justifiably they sought to find out from the Minister what the contents of the agreement are. There is no use in offering us two sheets of paper and saying: "I have made an agreement. I have acquired shares in Bula. I want this Bill passed through the Oireachtas." That is not good enough. If a Minister coming in with legislation like this does not supply details of the agreement it is impossible for us to accept the Bill.
If anything goes wrong with this undertaking—and where public property is concerned I always wish the undertaking well—we on this side of the House cannot be blamed for it because we have not seen the agreement. I am only a layman but I have a fair knowledge of what I would require from my legal representative if purchasing shares or property and I would be back to him very quickly if he made any error in regard to the agreement since I would be the sufferer. I believe the Minister erred when at the beginning of this debate he was requested to produce the agreement by Deputies O'Malley and Colley and did not do so. If there was nothing to hide, he should have come in with the agreement at a very early stage, especially as certain questions were being asked and certain aspects of it were in doubt. By so doing he would have strengthened his position and would have a much stronger argument in the eyes of the public and the eyes of capital investors in the public sector. He has weakened his position.
If he were seeking money from the World Bank, the IMF or the European Investment Bank, would the Minister have to reveal the agreement to those financial institutions? Are they more important than Dáil Éireann? The Minister may have to answer that question in future. We know the pressures being put on the Minister for Finance by the various international financial institutions. They will want to know where the money lent to this Government is invested. If the Minister goes to any financial institution and says that we are investing £10 million or £20 million in a particular company and is asked about the agreement and he says that it is secret, I think the answer he will get is that if he wants to keep his documents secret they will keep their finances.
This type of secrecy does not enhance public confidence in the Government which is very lacking at present. People in the business world who come to me are naturally concerned as regards the contents of this agreement. They are concerned with how the State finances are invested. They are entitled to ask questions because the money involved includes their money also. They are concerned when they find the Minister withholding the information. If public confidence is undermined, it is very difficult to re-establish it. Confidence in the present Administration is known to us and we do not want it further eroded. I should not think of trying to undermine public confidence but the Minister by withholding the agreement is to a certain extent undermining public confidence both at home and in the international sphere. We would not demand the agreement if it were not right to do so. Even at this late stage the Minister should reveal it.
As regards the amendments proposed by Deputy O'Malley and Deputy Colley to insert the word "secret", if I ask in the Library for the agreement between Bula and the Government the assistant will have to tell me that she has not got it because it is a secret agreement. Normally, the agreement would be available either in the Library or in Dublin Castle if I paid money to see it, or somewhere else. It is a secret agreement and we are justified in seeking to insert the word "secret".
As other speakers have pointed out, the agreement is available in many sectors but it is not available to Dáil Éireann. It is available to various banking institutions concerned with it, to many senior civil servants and no doubt there is secrecy in the civil service for which I have the highest respect. It is available to many managers and assistant managers in banking institutions and no doubt to many members of the legal profession within those institutions. It is available to their private secretaries who keep minutes. It would be wrong to think the agreement is confined to the Minister and the managing director of Bula. When we have processed this Bill there are people who cannot discuss in various parts of the country the contents of the agreement. We, in Dáil Éireann who are supposed to speak on behalf of the people evidently cannot be trusted with or are not capable of dealing with this very secret document. That type of situation is bound to undermine confidence, bound to pose questions and create doubt in the mind of many people who have followed this debate daily in the newspapers.
It is against that background that I believe the Minister has made a grave mistake by not revealing the contents of this document to the House. Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley over the past month have been trying to get some information about this but have failed. As I said, the rest of this Bill is of no consequence; it is just a piece of paper. Any business transaction must show a purchaser what he is buying. In this case only the Minister is competent to decide whether this is a good investment. The people are shrewd judges of investments. It is a good investment, let there be a public debate. That is open democracy, open Government—what the Coalition promised when they came into office.
In my 12 years in this House this is the first time I have seen such a Bill. We have had many complicated Bills. Deputy Colley and I spent two years trying to unravel financial legislation but at least we got the answers from the Minister and the Revenue Commissioners. Today we are talking in a vacuum, we have a Bill consisting of two sheets of paper asking us to accept that the acquisition of these shares is right. I would not accept that and because I have not seen the document I say they are wrong.
If a businessman asked me to buy a third share in a business and said "I have made the agreement. I have purchased a third of the shares and I want £50,000 from you but the other partner who owns half the shares insists that I do not reveal the agreement to you." Does anybody think I would accept that from that businessman? Of course, I would not. I would consider him a lunatic to make such a suggestion in the first place. This is far more important than the example I have given. This is not a private investment; it is a public investment. That is an entirely different matter. In my opinion, the Minister has made a mistake by taking responsibility for the secret agreement on his own shoulders. If he had shared the contents of the agreement and if anything happened in the foreseeable future, the responsibility would not be so great. God forbid that anything should go wrong in the future.
Nobody in this House knows what is in the agreement. It is of vital importance to know how the Minister can strengthen his hand in the company, how the shares are held, or what shares will be allowed hold in the future. It is vitally important that public investment of £9.5 million be properly protected. How do we know what these shares will be worth in ten years time unless the agreement signed by the Minister and the other shareholder is right?
We all know the value of minority shareholdings. We know the authority a director with a minority shareholder has in comparison with the director with a majority shareholder. Do not let anybody tell you that there is not a difference. However, we will discuss this later. Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley have every right to question what is contained in the agreement. The Minister says they are not entitled to demand this information.
We can all see the reason why this Bill has been debated at length. Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley are to be congratulated for the way they teased out this difficult problem, for looking at this Bill when it was first circulated. It could very easily have slipped through the House because on the face of it it is very simple. Now we realise the implications of the hidden part of this Bill. Everybody knows that one or two lines of a Bill can be of vital importance. In Finance Bills one or two lines can often make all the difference. This is so here. This section which contains the agreement is the important section. Everything else is of secondary importance. What is important is that the most significant part of the Bill—the terms of the agreement—is not revealed to the House.
I do not know how the Minister could have expected to get a Bill like this through the House. He mentioned at the beginning that he was anxious to get it through in as short a time as possible but with such a large sum of public money involved this could not be hurried because it is too serious a matter. Irrespective of the amount involved, it must be remembered that this public money must be accounted for and the necessary legislation must be passed by both Houses. It will be a very difficult job for the President and the Supreme Court to adjudicate on this document without reading the agreement. They have the final say. If the President is deprived of looking at the agreement it will be difficult for him to reach a final decision.
As I have said, there are people involved in international monetary interests like the IMF who in future will demand information in respect of agreements of this kind when we have to go to them looking for funds. That was stated by the Minister for Finance in his budget speech. It will be so particularly in relation to considerable sums of money such as this £9.5 million.
The Minister said we have held up the Bill. We agree with him that this is important legislation which we should like to see enacted expeditiously. It was never the intention of the Opposition to hold up the Bill. It has been held up by the Minister because of his failure to reveal desirable information. Does the Minister think the Opposition can sit back and without being supplied with important information allow legislation to go through? If we did that we would be failing in our duty. It is the duty of this side to stay here until Christmas, if necessary, to process important legislation. The Minister cannot blame anybody for the delay but himself and the Government. We are not talking about an ordinary agreement but of a secret one between the Minister and Bula Limited.
The nature of the Minister's reply to the case I made surprised me. I suppose it should not have because it largely consisted of arrogance and contempt for the House and the manner in which he has tried to put the Bill through the House was nothing but a display of arrogance and contempt, an attempt to get the House to rubber stamp this measure without having been given any knowledge of the transaction. I accuse the Minister of arrogance and contempt because the principal argument he used was that he deemed the term "secret" to mean that something was not known to exist, that its existence was not known. Of course it is clearly demonstrable that there is no substance in that argument because the phrase "secret agreement" in itself means that the existence of the agreement is known. The Minister knows a great deal more and has a great deal more intelligence than to rely on an argument of that kind. Of course he just wanted to go through the motions and have a vote as soon as possible.
The House deserves a little better than that from the Minister. He threw in the suggestion that there are important Bills that he and other Ministers, but he in particular, want to bring forward—job-creating Bills, he said— and he implied they are being held up by this debate. That is contemptible as far as this House is concerned. There is only one reason why these Bills are not before us, it is because the Government decided not to bring them forward—it is the Government who decide the Order of Business in this House, not the Opposition.
As Deputy Fitzpatrick has pointed out, this Bill would almost certainly have gone through with considerable expedition if it had been approached in the way other Ministers have approached Bills of this kind. It is not good enough for a Minister who has introduced this type of legislation for the first time in the history of the State to try to suggest that the Opposition are responsible for the delay simply because we have tried to find out what it is the Minister is trying to conceal, trying to cover up.
Although we have described the agreement as secret, it might be true to say, in a sense, as has been suggested by Deputy Crowley, that it is only semi-secret. The Minister has chosen to tell us some of the terms of the agreement because he thought it suited him, and others have been prised out of him. We know that one requirement of the agreement is that the Minister proposes to acquire a minority holding in Bula Limited. We also know that by acquiring that minority holding the Minister cannot control what will happen in this company. We know that on the face of it, and from the information available to us, the Minister has made a very poor commercial deal. Indeed he gave the distinct impression that he had not learned until well into the debate, if yet, the difference between a minority and a majority holding and that its valuation was not the same as the proportion of the shareholding.
We also know the Minister has got himself into a position in which this secret agreement appears to contain a provision whereby the Minister was tied to whichever figure was arrived at by the arbitrator—that he did not have the option of saying "The figure is too high, I will not accept it, I will not go ahead with the deal"—because on all the evidence available the figure the Minister was advised should be paid was far below the figure he is now obliged to pay. There is ample precedent for the State making an agreement with a let-out clause, particularly where a lot of money is concerned. We know the agreement was unsatisfactory from that point of view. We also know that the Minister has tried, in the disclosure by him of some aspects of the agreement, to suggest that in some way he has been protecting the interests of an Irish company against shadowy multinationals. Not due to any disclosure by the Minister, it has emerged that on the very day that he signed his agreement with this allegedly Irish company, perhaps within minutes of signing it, 80 per cent of the shares were vested in a subsidiary of a foreign, multi-national bank. We do not know whether the Minister knew that at the time he signed the agreement. What we do know is that that very relevant fact was concealed from this House, and either it was concealed by the Minister or he did not know it. Either way it adds up to a deal incompetently negotiated the details of which have been concealed and no good reason for the concealment has been given. The conclusion is inescapable. The real reason for the concealment is the incompetence of the Minister which he is endeavouring to keep as quiet as possible.
Deputy Fitzpatrick said very truly that this short and apparently innocuous Bill could very easily have gone through this House without much consideration but for the vigilance of Deputy O'Malley, and if nothing else emerged from this debate apart from what has already emerged as a result of Deputy O'Malley's vigilance and diligence, the debate would have been well worth while and would have justified itself fully in the eyes of the general public. Given that there is this secret agreement and that what we know of it displays the fact that it was a poorly negotiated agreement omitting the basic and fundamental precautions one would have expected the Minister to take when acting on behalf of the public, given the expenditure of a very large sum of public money. I suggest again that the very least that this House can do when the full terms of the agreement are being concealed is to try to indicate in the terms of the Bill that the Members of this House have no responsibility in and have not approved this agreement. That can be done by inserting the word "secret" as proposed in this amendment.
The nature of the transaction is not fully known to us. The terms of this agreement are certainly not fully known to us, but what we do know and the more we learn of those terms, the more doubtful—to put it mildly— we become. The more I learn of this transaction, largely as a result of Deputy O'Malley's investigations, the more horrified and concerned I am about what is being concealed still. I want to have no part of this transaction as a Member of this House. I want to have no part of anybody being able to say that I approved in any way of this agreement. I disapprove of it and I have the gravest apprehensions as to what may be contained in the parts we do know about. I want to see on the record of this Bill a word, a phrase or a section that will make it quite clear that this agreement did not come before this House and was not approved by this House or the Members of this House. If the Minister refuses that request, as he has indicated he intends to do, that is his privilege within the rules of order, I and my colleagues, and I suspect others, will not let the matter rest there and we will ensure in any way we can when the chickens come home to roost on this transaction, that the full responsibility for what has been done and for this secret agreement lies on the shoulders of the Minister for Industry and Commerce and his colleagues in Government and not on the people on this side of the House, and only to a limited extent on the back-benchers behind him whom he is about to summon in to push this through.
Amendment put.
The Dáil divided : Tá, 49; Níl, 59.
Tá
- Andrews, David.
- Brady, Philip A.
- Brennan, Joseph.
- Brugha, Ruairí.
- Burke, Raphael P.
- Callanan, John.
- Carter, Frank.
- Colley, George.
- Collins, Gerard.
- Connolly, Gerard.
- Crinion, Brendan.
- Cronin, Jerry.
- Crowley, Flor.
- Daly, Brendan.
- Davern, Noel.
- de Valera, Vivion.
- Fahey, Jackie.
- Farrell, Joseph.
- Faulkner, Pádraig.
- Fitzgerald, Gene.
- Fitzpatrick, Tom (Dublin Central).
- Gallagher, Denis.
- Geoghegan-Quinn, Máire.
- Gogan, Richard P.
- Healy, Augustine A.
- Briscoe, Ben.
- Brosnan, Seán.
- Browne, Seán.
- Hussey, Thomas.
- Lalor, Patrick J.
- Leonard, James.
- Loughnane, William.
- Lynch, Jack.
- McEllistrim, Thomas.
- MacSharry, Ray.
- Meaney, Tom.
- Molloy, Robert.
- Moore, Seán.
- Murphy, Ciarán.
- Nolan, Thomas.
- Noonan, Michael.
- O'Connor, Timothy.
- O'Kennedy, Michael.
- Power, Patrick.
- Timmons, Eugene.
- Tunney, Jim.
- Walsh, Seán.
- Wilson, John P.
- Wyse, Pearse.
Níl
- Barry, Peter.
- Barry, Richard.
- Belton, Luke.
- Belton, Paddy.
- Bermingham, Joseph.
- Bruton, John.
- Burke, Joan T.
- Burke, Liam.
- Cluskey, Frank.
- Collins, Edward.
- Conlan, John F.
- Coogan, Fintan.
- Cooney, Patrick M.
- Corish, Brendan.
- Cosgrave, Liam.
- Costello, Declan.
- Coughlan, Stephen.
- Creed, Donal.
- Crotty, Kieran.
- Cruise-O'Brien, Conor.
- Desmond, Barry.
- Desmond, Eileen.
- Dockrell, Henry P.
- Dockrell, Maurice.
- Donegan, Patrick S.
- Donnellan, John.
- Dunne, Thomas.
- Enright, Thomas.
- Esmonde, John G.
- Finn, Martin.
- Fitzpatrick, Tom (Cavan).
- Flanagan, Oliver J.
- Governey, Desmond.
- Griffin, Brendan.
- Halligan, Brendan.
- Hegarty, Patrick.
- Hogan O'Higgins, Brigid.
- Jones, Denis F.
- Keating, Justin.
- Kelly, John.
- Kenny, Enda.
- Kyne, Thomas A.
- Lynch, Gerard.
- McLaughlin, Joseph.
- Malone, Patrick.
- Murphy, Michael P.
- O'Brien, Fergus.
- O'Connell, John.
- O'Donnell, Tom.
- O'Sullivan, John L.
- Pattison, Seamus.
- Reynolds, Patrick J.
- Ryan, John J.
- Ryan, Richie.
- Staunton, Myles.
- Taylor, Frank.
- Timmins, Godfrey.
- Toal, Brendan.
- Tully, James.
Tellers : Tá, Deputies Lalor and Browne; Níl, Deputies Kelly and B. Desmond.
Amendment declared lost.
I move amendment No. 3:
In page 2, line 15, to delete "certain other parties named in the Agreement" and substitute "Thomas Celestine Roche, Michael James Wymes, Richard Wood and Thomas Joseph Roche".
If one looks at the section involved, one finds the definition of "the Agreement". By way of identification it is described as "the agreement dated the 12th day of December, 1975, and made between Bula Holdings, Patrick Wright, certain other parties named in the Agreement and the Minister;". The parties are named but "certain other parties" are not named. I do not know why this should have been so in the first place but I know that in the course of the debate the Minister, under some pressure, gave the names which are set out in the amendment as the names of the "certain other parties" referred to. Since the names of the parties to the agreement, Bula Holdings, Patrick Wright and the Minister are disclosed and since the Minister has given the full names of the "certain other parties", there does not seem to be much point in concealing them or omitting them.
This was the position up to a short time ago. However, I have to confess it may have changed because it now appears that whatever indirect interest these four people had in the company —I say "indirect interest" because I am assuming, although I do not know, they had an interest in Bula Holdings—does not exist now according to the records of the company as filed in the company's office. They do not have that interest either directly or through Bula Holdings because it has now transpired that presumably immediately after the Minister signed the agreement, certainly on the same day, a very substantial change took place in the shareholding of this company. As a result of this, the shares of Bula Holdings, amounting to 80 per cent of the share capital, were transferred to a subsidiary of the Midland Bank. Therefore, as far as the company and the filed returns of the company are concerned, neither of these individuals nor Bula Holdings any longer has any interest in Bula Limited.
I notice that some commentator on the debate on the last occasion suggested that the Minister had said that this occurred because of a mortgage by Bula Holdings of its interest to a subsidiary of the Midland Bank. I do not think the Minister said that. Deputy O'Malley suggested it as a possible explanation but so far as the record of the company is concerned neither of these individuals nor Bula Holdings holds any shares in this company into which the Minister proposes to buy.
I must confess I am in some difficulty about this amendment. While it is true that it would be correctly naming the parties to the agreement referred to, nevertheless, it appears that as of now these people have no interest in the company. It has been suggested that because this may be simply a mortgage arrangement they have an interest which will be reflected in due course in their registration, Bula Holdings being registered again as the holder of shares in the company. I am not sure if that is so but I can say that as of now Bula Limited are controlled effectively as to 80 per cent by a subsidiary of the Midland Bank. This means the existing directors could be sacked by the Midland Bank; dividends, if any, would be paid to the Midland Bank and any decisions to be made by the company would be made by the Midland Bank subsidiary.
It is not a question in the ordinary way where there might be a blank transfer executed by the owners of shares and held by the bank. This actual transfer of shares into the name of the bank is a quite unusual step if it is on foot of a mortgage. It should be clear to everyone that Bula Limited are under no obligation to recognise any mortgage of that kind or to act as though the shares are held in trust by the subsidiary of the Midland Bank for Bula Holdings. In fact, the company cannot and will not act in that way. For all purposes they will treat the subsidiary of the Midland Bank as the owner of 80 per cent of the shares as long as they are so registered.
I received a copy of a telex message —it was actually sent to Deputy O'Malley—which I understand was sent to one of the people mentioned in the amendment. It reads as follows:
You are reported as saying that pending the loan repayment the bank acts in accordance with the wishes of the beneficial owners but when the loan is repaid the bank is obliged to re-transfer the shares to Bula Holdings or its nominees. Did you clear the statement with Northern Bank Finance Corporation? Your statement is one hundred per cent wrong if it purports to represent Northern Bank Finance Corporation's position. Northern Bank Finance Corporation claim the right to dismiss the board and sell off the assets without reference to the beneficial owner or otherwise. We refer you to the J. G. Mooney case. We refer you to the call clause in Northern Bank Finance Corporation loans.
The signature and address are given on it but I do not propose to reveal them here unless it is necessary. It draws attention to the reality of the situation that arose the moment the Minister signed the agreement. This situation, as far as we know, has continued until now.
I do not know in what way we can determine, given those circumstances, whether or not there has been a complete sale of the 80 per cent shares by Bula Holdings. There is nothing, on the face of the information available, to suggest anything else. We know that on the 12th December, 1975, an agreement was made by Bula Holdings and Patrick Wright to sell some of their shares in Bula Limited to the Minister. Some hours later apparently Bula Holdings transferred all their shares to this subsidiary of the Midland Bank.
The Minister told us that these shares must be retransferred or he will not complete this deal. I refer to Volume 297, column 920 of the Official Report of the 8th March, 1977, where he is reported as saying:
At the time of the completion of the contract for the share purchase by me the shareholders in Bula Limited, that is Bula Holdings and the estate of Mr. Wright, must be the owners of the entire share capital of Bula Limited.
On what does the Minister base that statement? Is there a provision to that effect in the secret agreement we have referred to? If there is it is an unusual one. On the face of it, it should not make any difference to the Minister because he is acquiring shares in Bula Limited and it makes no difference to him or to their value from whom he acquires them.
Why should there be a provision in a secret agreement that he will not acquire them except from those people? If the Minister did not know of this proposed transfer to the subsidiary of the Midland Bank why would he have such a provision in the agreement? On the other hand, if he knew of it I suggest that clearly he has been concealing that information from the House for a considerable time. It only became available because of the searches made by Deputy O'Malley and also because of the pressures put on him in the House to have the various returns due by this company filed, as they should have been done in accordance with the Companies Acts.
Is the explanation to this that the Minister was not willing to disclose that he might be paying out £9.54 million or the best part of it to a subsidiary of the Midland Bank? In the circumstances, we should know what are the terms on which the retransfer of the shares to Bula Holdings will take place. The Minister says in effect that the deal is off if these are not transferred and, therefore, the terms on which the retransfer will take place are vital. Why has the House been asked to waste so much time on a deal which may never go through because if the shares are not retransferred, according to the Minister, this deal will not go through? We have no evidence that they will be retransferred or the terms under which they will be retransferred. Is it the shareholders in Bula Holdings who have raised this money or is it Bula Limited into which the Minister proposes to buy, who have borrowed? On the face of it, it looks as though it is Bula Holdings who have borrowed because it is their shares which have been transferred.
One wonders if there is any point in including the names of those individuals. Have they or have they not got an indirect interest in Bula Limited? According to the returns available now they do not. If the Minister has information that they have an indirect interest then the question arises what is the interest? In what circumstances will the shares be retransferred and in what circumstances will the deal go through? It is quite clear from the day the Minister made this agreement to today that 80 per cent of the shares of Bula Limited have been owned by a subsidiary of the Midland Bank.
This fact was concealed by the Minister and only unearthed on 3rd March as a result of pressures in the House. We are entitled to ask why it was concealed. We are also entitled to ask if the Minister did not know any more about it than we did what was his reaction when he discovered this situation? What steps has he taken to see have these people mentioned in our amendment any interest in this company any more? Are they the people with whom he is now dealing or is he dealing with the subsidiary of the Midland Bank who are the registered owners of these shares? Does he accept that as registered owners of the shares these people control the company, that they can dismiss the directors or make any other changes as they wish? Are they bound by the agreement that is referred to here to the extent that the Minister can be sure of getting the shareholding he is talking of? On the other hand, can these people step into the shoes of the people with whom they entered into the agreement and complete the deal with the Minister and, if so, will the Minister pay the money to them? If he will not pay the money to them but insists on paying it only to certain other parties described in the section and to the people named in this amendment and to the estate of Patrick Wright, what is the reason for this? Would it be due partly to the fact that the Minister says he has a guarantee from the four named individuals for the carrying out of the agreement? If this is so, how can any of those parties guarantee the performance of this agreement if they do not own the shares and, consequently, have no say in the company? The whole situation seems to be confused, to say the least.
When he is replying, the Minister would do well to take the opportunity of spelling out clearly what is the real position because at present the picture that emerges is not one that could give any reassurance to anybody concerned with the State's proposed investment in this company, either as to the control of the company or to the terms on which a retransfer of shares will be met. I have only outlined some of the difficulties that arise. The Minister should tell us, too, whether he can insist that the deal can go through only if a retransfer takes place and tell us what would happen if the Midland Bank's subsidiary ignore the Minister and operate the company in a way that seemed most profitable to them, thereby disregarding the Minister's interest which, apparently, is based on an agreement, not with Bula Limited, but with people who were shareholders in that company. I trust, also, that the Minister will tell us how the guarantee to which he has referred can possibly be enforced in these circumstances. It would help, too, if he would explain whether the agreement contains a provision to the effect that he will complete the deal and is obliged to complete it only if the shares are in the registered ownership of those named in this amendment together with the estate of Patrick Wright.
If there is such a clause, the Minister should explain why it is there. It would seem to imply that he knew when signing the agreement what was about to happen. On the other hand, if there is no such clause how can he insist that the deal will go through only when the shares are retransferred? Above all, why has the Minister not sorted out the whole matter clearly before coming to the House with a Bill of this kind and leaving us in the position of having to spend so much time endeavouring to ascertain even portion of the facts? What we have ascertained suggests that a great deal of the time of the House has been wasted by the Minister in having us discuss this transaction which may never happen or, which if it happens, is uncertain as to the time and on what terms it will take place. This situation renders even more contemptible the case made by the Minister earlier this evening when he suggested that other important measures, some of which he claimed were for the purpose of creating jobs, were being held up as a result of discussion of this Bill.
In his own interest the Minister has a great deal to explain. The question as to whether the names of these parties should be included can hinge to a large extent on the answers he gives and on whether these people have any interest, either direct or indirect, in this company.
I should remind the House that what is being discussed is an amendment by which it is suggested that the words in the definition be deleted and the words of certain named persons be inserted. In reply to queries that were raised during the Second Stage debate, the Minister informed the House that the parties to the agreement who are not named in the definition section of the Bill are set out at column 493 of the Official Report for 1st February. The amendment that the House is considering proposes to put the names of these persons in the definition section.
The House should realise what the legal position is in relation to the drafting of the definition section. The Bill proposes to enable the Minister to do certain things in accordance with an agreement that is referred to and which is defined in the definition section. The definition refers to the date of the agreement and to the names of certain of but not all the parties to it. This is a perfectly normal way of identifying an agreement. There is no legal significance in the fact that all the names of the parties concerned were not included in the definition section. Neither would it introduce any legal significance to insert the amendment suggested.
The Attorney General places a lot of emphasis on the question of legal significance. I suggest that there would be much significance in the publishing of the full list of names of those who signed the agreement with the Minister. I say this because only very recently we discovered that the shares of Bula Holdings are owned by the Midland Bank. Yet, the Minister asked us to accept that Bula Limited and Patrick Wright be accepted as the two parties named in the agreement.
Is it not the position that the Midland Bank are the registered owners of 80 per cent of the shares of Bula Limited? Are we in this House not entitled to know what people comprise the board of Bula Limited? It is not without significance that on the very day the Minister signed an agreement with Bula Limited, Bula Limited transferred all their shares to a subsidiary of the Midland Bank. Does the Minister know when this signing-over took place? I would like to hear the Minister's reply to this. When were these shares transferred to the subsidiary of the Midland Bank? Were they transferred, as I assume, after the Minister had signed the agreement or before? The Minister has a very serious obligation to let us know when exactly the transfer of these shares took place. If the Minister does not know the answer, as we will have to assume if he does not reply, as Deputy Colley said, we have spent weeks debating an event that will not happen. It is remarkable and even sinister that on the very day the Minister entered into an agreement with Bula Limited a transfer of 800,000 of those shares took place. Maybe when the Minister is replying he will tell us the significance of this transfer and exactly what time it took place.
We knew that up to then 80 per cent of Bula Limited was owned by Bula Holdings and 20 per cent by Patrick Wright. We assumed that the directors of Bula Limited were the directors of Bula Holdings and Patrick Wright. I would like the Minister to tell this House if there has been increased representation on that board, and if so by how many, and will he name them? A Mr. Young was mentioned here last week as being another director. Are there any further directors? Obviously, the Midland Bank through its subsidiary became owners of 800,000 shares in order to further their security for the money they loaned. It may annoy the Minister intensely but he is treating this House with contempt. I would not set any higher standards for the Minister; we know what he is made of. I would like the Minister to tell this House why he entered into an agreement with a company that on the day he signed that agreement transferred their shares. The answer to that would be very interesting. I submit that the Minister's agreement was with Bula Limited and certain undertakings were given as a result of the agreement that he signed with Bula Limited. I would like the Minister to tell us if these undertakings can be sustained in view of the new makeup of the company. As far as the ordinary person is concerned, a Minister in an Irish Government has handed over to a solid Tory bank the right to determine whether or not we start mining in Navan.
The Deputy will appreciate that the amendment is very limited in scope.
This is directly concerned with it.
It has to do with the insertion of certain names and the Deputy has to direct his remarks to that subject.
Exactly and one of those people concerned is the nominee of the Midland Bank. It is very significant.
It is the signatories of the agreement we are concerned with here.
Does the Ceann Comhairle know who the signatories of the agreement are?
The Deputy may not drag the Chair into discussion.
This is what we are trying to find out—the signatories of the agreement. It seems to us lay people—of course we do not have the benefit of the socialist training that the Minister has—that it is sinister that Minister Keating entered into an agreement with a company that transferred all its shares to another company on the day he signed this agreement with them. What kind of a Minister would involve himself in that kind of a transaction? Would a Minister who had the interests of the Irish taxpayer at heart enter that kind of dubious set-up? Would a Minister who has done any of his homework sign an agreement under these conditions? Would a Minister, but for the fact that he had become a prisoner of his own ecological clichés, hurry himself into an arrangement whereby he squandered £9.54 million of the taxpayers' money.
I am afraid the Deputy is straying considerably from the amendment.
I may be straying very close to the nub of the situation and I am certainly embarrassing the Minister in relation to the disastrous arrangement he made. Is it not true that the effective owners and controllers of the company at the moment are the Midland Bank through its subsidiary? Would the Minister tell us what undertakings has the Midland Bank given to Bula Holdings that they will at any stage transfer the shares back to the former directors of Bula Holdings? Have we arrived at a situation in this country, through the Minister's inefficiency, stupidity and carelessness in the matter, whereby we have again sold off our mining rights to a foreign company? On the 12th of December, 1975, the Minister signed an agreement with Bula Limited and I asked from the outset that the Minister tell us what time he signed the agreement and at what time the transfer of shares took place from Bula Holdings to the Midland Bank.
Over the past six weeks Deputy O'Malley and Deputy Colley and others on this side of the House have consistently requested the Minister to make available certain information, and he has consistently refused to give it. In putting down this amendment we are trying to find out what exactly the set-up is in relation to the directors, and with whom exactly did the Minister enter into agreement. We do not know. The Minister does not know because, at one stage when he was asked who the beneficial owners were, he did not know whether they were Bula Holdings or Bula Limited. He gave three different answers.
Before the Minister comes into this House again to present a Bill, I would ask him to make himself aware of the facts and not treat the House with contempt. He should give us some of the answers we have been asking for because it will not stop there, I can assure the Minister. If the Minister is not prepared to reply in this House, we can draw our own conclusions as to the reasons. It is also important that we should be told about each and every director together with their shareholdings. If the Minister knows who they are, he should tell us. If he knows what shareholding they have, he should tell the House.
We are fast arriving at a position where the Minister will have lost all credibility. Nobody believes him any more, no matter how many Press conferences he holds after the Dáil rises. Not even those who are most sympathetic to him will swallow what he has been trying to tell them. Apart from looking after his own public image, he should be looking after the taxpayers' money. We want to know exactly who the parties are with whom the Minister has entered into agreement. If he is not prepared to tell us, we can assume why he will not tell us.
(Dublin Central): There is an old saying that he who pays the piper calls the tune. That is also true in commercial and business life. He who invests the money directs the policy of the company. It is revealing this evening to find that Bula Holdings have transferred 80 per cent of their shares to the Midland Bank Limited represented in this country by the Northern Finance Company. We know when this undertaking goes into operation who will control and direct the affairs of this holding.
A few moments ago Deputy Colley said he received a letter pointing out certain aspects so far as the Northern Bank were concerned, and he quoted one or two aspects of their affairs. He mentioned Mooneys and Company Limited who were a public company at that time. I followed the history of Mooneys Holdings for a considerable time. I remember when they were practically owned by a family. I remember when a prominent person took them over with the help of the Northern Finance Company. I remember who ran the board then and eventually who sold that company, who decided at what time certain property should be sold—the directors put on the board by the Northern Finance Company.
A serious implication arises with regard to what power the Midland Bank will have. Anyone who read their annual report last year and saw their profits will understand what an enormous company they are. They are a reputable bank and their branch in this company is also reputable. This was not the holding the Minister originally decided he would enter into. There are people we may join in business, and people we may not join. I am not saying we would not join with the Midland Bank or the Northern Finance Company. The point is the Minister decided that he would join with the directors of Bula Limited. He made up his mind he would invest the State's money with them. Having decided that, he should know exactly where the company were moving to and who was taking control of them. If you were a major shareholder in a company you would be very concerned to know how the major shareholders were transferring their shares. That is of vital importance.
I understand the Minister has given an undertaking that this money will not be transferred until such time as the shares are returned to the original shareholders. That being so, I can see major complications arising on one aspect where the Minister is concerned and on another aspect where the Northern Bank are concerned. With inflation and the costing of the shares, there could be a very long drawn out legal wrangle to see how the Bula shareholders will get a return of their shares. The Minister should know exactly who the major shareholders will be. He has only the minority of the shares and he will depend to a very large extent on who the majority shareholders are. He will have to depend on how quickly this company can get into operation.
I am not sure what name should be added to this amendment. If the Northern Bank have the major shareholding, like any other business people, they will control the board. The Minister probably met people and negotiated with them in his Department with regard to taking an interest in this mine, but he may not be dealing with them in the future. He will have to deal with representatives of the Northern Finance Company if the information Deputy Colley revealed here this evening is true and I am sure it is, that 80 per cent of the shares are transferred.
This is dealing with the names of the persons on the agreement, not the shareholders.
(Dublin Central): I believe other names should be attached to this amendment, the names of the persons from the Northern Bank who will be on it. We should inquire from that bank who the Minister will have to deal with in the future. He will find that dealing with large finance companies——
May I again suggest the Deputy is dealing with something which is not covered by the amendment? The amendment deals specifically with certain names.
I have already ruled that this amendment is very limited in scope and refers to the insertion of certain specified names in the Bill. One would expect the Deputy to confine his remarks to the amendment. I have been allowing the Deputy to develop his point and I have given him a lot of latitude in this regard.
(Dublin Central): It is quite obvious that the people who will control this company will be nominated by a finance company. The Minister knows that perfectly well. Is the Minister telling me that any finance company who are prepared to lend 80 per cent are not going to take the shares as collateral as these shares are transferred? I do not believe it; I know how finance companies work. I know what they do in any business where they have invested such a large amount of money. One can read the history and see who eventually controlled the companies Deputy Colley mentioned. One can see what they were sold for in comparison with the money lent. I have vivid memories of transactions in this city. We know who dictates policy. I am concerned that the Minister did not realise when drawing up this agreement with the original shareholders that he will have to deal with these financiers. He is not sure what expertise they have in this field. It is nonsense to suggest here that the people he originally dealt with will sit on the board of the company and direct its policy. No finance company would allow that.
May I draw the attention of the Chair to the section and the amendment that we are dealing with because it seems to me that if the Deputy continues as he is going, only certain inferences can be drawn from his continuance in dealing with something that has nothing to do with the amendment? If I may say so, the amendment is a very clear and definite one dealing with the insertion of certain names in the definition clause. If the Deputy does not want to deal with that and to deal with the various other matters that have nothing to do with it, only certain inferences can be drawn from a line of debate carried on in that way.
I have already ruled in that matter. I have allowed a lot of latitude and I have permitted the Deputy to develop his point in order to come directly to the amendment and the names specified in it.
(Dublin Central): My only argument is that the amendment is not broad enough; it should have been broadened considerably because there are other names which will emerge and I should like to see them included but we do not know who they are, the names that will be put forward to the Minister, and whether he likes it or not he will accept them. There is no way he can get out of that situation. According to Deputy Colley, the Minister has given an undertaking that this money will not be transferred until such time as these shares are returned.
What has that to do with the amendment? With respect, I suggest the Deputy is abusing the procedure of the House.
The Chair must be allowed to govern debate in the House.
Would the Attorney General tell us what is the position here as regards the names?
That must be obvious.
It is not obvious to me.
Deputy Fitzpatrick on the amendment.
(Dublin Central): The amendment is in order and Deputy Colley has argued that it is problematical whether the names mentioned in the amendment will be the real names. Will they have the right to exercise the authority over the running of this company? Deputy Colley raised this as a result not so much of information given by the Minister but as a result of Deputy O'Malley and Deputy Colley investigating, it was disclosed that 80 per cent of these shares——
The Deputy is straying from the amendment. We must get back to it.
(Dublin Central): But the amendment amounts to this and, as Deputy Colley pointed out, these are the names put forward but they may not be the names which will eventually appear in the running of the company. We cannot get away from that. Other names are being thought of in the Midland Bank and the Northern Finance Company at the present time. The Minister knows that. Will any financial institution hand over that amount of money without protecting their interests? They have been caught too often. I know the steps they have been taking in recent years as regards taking equity and protecting their interests.
That is not relevant.
(Dublin Central): It is relevant in that if the Minister tells me they will have no share in this company, I do not believe it. They are not a benevolent institution.
The Deputy must get back to the amendment.
(Dublin Central): I wish to support the amendment. We are trying to tease out who will run the company. The names in the amendment emerged during the debate, names of people that Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley thought genuinely owned the shares of the company.
I have been goaded into using the word that I inferred. We are being subjected to a filibuster in the House at present.
(Dublin Central): If that is the only phrase, “subjected to a filibuster” that the Attorney General can use, I have more concern about £9.5 million of public money. If 80 per cent of a company in which the Minister has an interest is transferred I take a more serious view than that of it, and I do not think this is a filibuster. This is of public importance. Anybody who has been speaking to business people in the city over the past three or four weeks will realise how seriously they are taking this matter. They are questioning——
We have had all that before. The Deputy is repeating himself.
(Dublin Central): There are other amendments and this will come up again. If the Chair thinks that I am at this time subjecting the House to a filibuster, I do not think so. I am convinced that the transfer of these shares is of major importance and nobody knows that better than the Minister. Having had to get loans from banks myself, I know what collateral I had to give and what control they took. I know what banks and financial institutions are like. I have had dealings with them although not of the magnitude involved here and I know the type of control they exercise.
Not just a filibuster but a farcical filibuster. The speeches of Deputies Crowley and Fitzpatrick consisted of shameful, farcical filibustering from people who would not take the trouble to acquaint themselves with the contents of last week's debate and who are using the privilege of the House to traduce people who have no defence. I challenge those Deputies to say those things and traduce the persons they have traduced outside the privilege of the House. They are abusing the privilege of the House, creating mischief, talking wrecking nonsense and they are not aware of the content of last week's debate or of the debate up to now. Had these Deputies been so aware, they would know that the crucial point is that the shares must be free of any charge at completion. It is a matter for Bula Holdings and the lenders to achieve that situation. All the mischief and speculation that we have heard from the last two speakers, this farcical filibuster, is irrelevant in the light of that statement which I put on the record of the House last week and which I now put on it again.
When did the transfer of shares take place?
I hope the Minister is not going to leave it there. We invited him to say on what he based that statement. If it is a clause in the agreement why is that clause there? Did he know this was happening?
We can infer from the Minister's silence that he did not know.
It is interesting to note that the only time the Minister gives an iota of information is when he loses his cool. If you search the records to see what we learned of Bula over the last few weeks, you will see that it is only when the Minister loses his temper and spits out something that we get more information. Here he is reminding both Deputy Crowley and Deputy Fitzpatrick that the warrant is au fait with something he said last week.
I note that so far he has not specifically commented on the amendment. He spoke about a farcical filibuster. The subject was introduced by the Attorney General who was embarrassed into coming here to hold the Minister's hand because of the way the State has got involved in this and in view of the fact that the Minister clearly does not have the answers. The Attorney General has been sent in here to clear up certain facts and he has not been making a good job of it. We had an outburst from the Minister a few moments ago simply because he was about to be deserted by the Attorney General who decided he had had enough.
The subsection we are dealing with here is a most extraordinary collection of words. It says:
"the Agreement" means the agreement dated the 12th day of December, 1975, and made between Bula Holdings, Patrick Wright, certain other parties named in the Agreement and the Minister;
When this section was being drafted why did the parliamentary draftsman decide to write in "certain other parties named in the Agreement", instead of naming the four people the Minister named on Second Stage? This is a straightforward amendment which names those four people in the same way as Patrick Wright was named. The Minister has made his contribution but has not said if he is accepting the amendment. We are assuming he is not accepting it and therefore we must ask why? I have not been in the House during all this debate but I have no doubt that these four people are the parties to the agreement. That is why Deputy O'Malley and Deputy Colley put down this amendment. The fact that the Minister does not accept it convinces me that there are other parties to the agreement about whom we know nothing. The phrase "certain other parties named in in the Agreement" makes me very suspicious of the agreement.
I question every act of the Minister in relation to this Bill and I do not apologise for doing so. I respect his cleverness in presentation and the way he is able to get messages across. It is because of that perculiar type of respect and admiration—both with question marks behind them—that I am so worried about the ambiguity of the definition of "the Agreement". The Minister has said, and I accept it, that we have harped again and again on this agreement. Here we have an extraordinary definition of "agreement" because in the definition section the word "agreement" is used twice.
Surely it is identified. That is all we are dealing with in this section.
We are dealing with the agreement.
So long as it is identified we know which agreement we are dealing with and that is what we are concerned with here.
We are dealing with a secret agreement nobody knows anything about, except the Minister, Bula Holdings, Patrick Wright and certain other people who we are assuming are the four people named in our amendment.
The agreement is identified.
We are not identifying the agreement, we are defining it. There is nothing in what the Minister has said so far which would indicate why he refuses to accept our amendment, unless the four names mentioned by us are not——
Will the Deputy yield to me for a moment?
Certainly.
I do not have the right to speak again but perhaps I can say this. I have no objection to accepting this amendment except that there are two factual errors in the names as proposed. If they are corrected I will accept it and we can move on.
Who is filibustering now?
For "Richard Wood" I would like to substitute "Richard Francis Wood" and for "Thomas Joseph Roche" to substitute "Thomas James Roche". All sorts of extraneous issues were raised but on the issue of accepting those names I am quite happy.
If the Minister tells us that his corrections are correct, I am very happy to accept them.
I believe they are.
Amendment, as amended, agreed to.
I move amendment No. 4:
In page 2, line 15, after "Minister" to add "which has not been made available to the Oireachtas".
As pointed out earlier, there is a similarity between amendments Nos. 2 and 4, but there is a difference because No. 4 goes further. No. 2 was designed simply to draw attention to the fact that there is a secret agreement, but this one specifically is designed to make it quite plain that the agreement was not made available to the Oireachtas, assuming that the Minister's approach in the Seanad will be the same as it has been here.
The agreement obviously has been made available to a large number of people, but not to the Members of the Oireachtas. It is necessary to point out that there are various provisions in the Bill under which certain powers may be exercised subject to the agreement, and the question immediately arises, if there were to be litigation on foot of those sections through which the Minister may exercise certain powers subject to the agreement, is there any way in which such cases could be decided without the production of the agreement? It would appear that the agreement has been produced already to quite a number of people, including bankers—I cannot say how extensively it has circulated among the staffs, but it is reasonable to assume there was a degree of circulation among the staffs of three, perhaps more, banking institutions—apart from the various parties to the agreement and their advisers. If it was possible to produce the agreement before the Bill has been enacted to those parties and to contemplate in due course the production of the agreement in court—presumably, on production in court the agreement would be available for public comment and report in the news media—then the fact that the Minister has refused to produce it to this House is of such singular significance that it should be recorded in the text of the Bill.
I have pointed out on a previous occasion that I regard the nonproduction of the agreement in the context of references to it in the Bill as being an attempt at a fundamental breach of the democratic procedure as we know it. It is asking this House, and presumably the other, simply to rubberstamp an agreement which the Minister has made.
On amendment No. 2 I went into some detail in quoting what we and the Minister had said on the conclusion of Second Stage and during Committee Stage in regard to the unprecedented nature of this Bill. In making those references I pointed out that the Minister had failed to produce a single precedent for what he had done. Replying on that amendment, the Minister said there were hundreds of examples. I would settle for one—one could pin down one example. We have repeatedly asked him to give one but he has failed to do so. I presume his reference to hundreds of examples relates back to what he had said in relation to IDA cases, but he has been obliged to admit reluctantly that he cannot produce one IDA case in which information relating to the terms of State investment in a company or project had been refused.
So, there is no precedent for what is being done here—the withholding of the agreement. Even at this late stage would the Minister mention one precedent, not hundreds, so that it can be examined precisely. If there is even one precedent, by now the Minister's advisers would have dragged it up for him. Because there is not a precedent —we can only work on that assumption in the circumstances—then the question of whether the fact that the agreement has not been produced assumes considerable importance.
I do not wish to repeat all the details I advanced on amendment No. 2, but it is necessary to recall that as far as people outside the House are concerned, when they read this Bill without a reference such as I attempt to insert by this amendment, they will have no indication that this House did not see or approve the agreement in question. Indeed, anybody reading the text of the Bill will not know what happened in the debate and would reasonably assume that the House had seen and approved the agreement. We know the facts are quite different, that the Minister has steadfastly refused to reveal the terms of the agreement in so far as it suited him. He revealed some details when it suited him.
The importance of showing on the face of the Bill that the agreement has not been produced to Members of the Oireachtas arises not only for the ordinary or casual person who may consult the Bill when enacted, but particularly in relation to the President's consideration of the Bill, though I assume the President is in no way precluded from having regard to what has been said in the House in the debates on the Bill. It is particularly important in the case of the courts. On that point the Minister has said he believes that if this matter were to come before the courts the thrust of the debate here would be brought to their attention. The Minister should check up a little on that argument. It is possible in a very limited case that that would be true, but in the general kind of case envisaged here it would not be true. The courts specifically are prohibited from having regard to what has been said in the Houses of the Oireachtas, and if a Minister on occasion gives an explanation for a particular section, or more important, an undertaking as to how the Revenue Commissioners will interpret a particular section and intend to operate it, and then if they operate it in a different way, in that case the courts are precluded from having any regard to the undertaking, no matter how solemn, given by the Minister for Finance, whoever he may be, in that regard. They are confined to the terms of the Bill that comes before them. That being so, the importance of recording on the face of the Bill that this agreement has not been produced to the Oireachtas will become clearer. If the courts are to be given a reasonable opportunity to interpret this Bill, should the matter come before them, in the light of the facts as they exist, not as they appear on the face of the Bill at the moment, an amendment of this kind is necessary.
Apart from that very important consideration there is also the question of the public record of this House. Deputies on this side of the House— and I can speak only for them—do not wish to be represented in due course on the record of this House as having approved an agreement the contents of which have not been disclosed or of having approved any measure based on such an agreement.
We have got some information in regard to the agreement and the more we get of such information the more we become apprehensive about what else may be in the agreement. The agreement appears to contain a provision to the effect that, no matter what figure the arbitrators come up with, the Minister is bound by it. That was an elementary precaution that apparently was omitted from the agreement with consequences which have turned out to be quite serious as far as the Minister is concerned. The Minister paid considerable sums of money for professional advice in this regard, and rightly so. He would be very foolish indeed to engage in this kind of transaction without the best professional advice he could get. He paid or is in the process of paying substantial sums for that advice. But, having received the advice, and as a result determining that the value to him of what he was proposing to buy was considerably less than the figure proposed in the Bill, he then found himself unable to use that advice because, apparently, he was obliged to accept whatever figure came from the arbitrators. He was right to get the professional advice and to pay for it, but he was not right to sign an agreement which obliged him, no matter what advice he had, to accept the figure coming from the arbitrators. Alternatively, if he intended to engage in that kind of operation so that he would be bound anyway, he should not have been spending money on professional advice which he could not use. He did not follow the ample precedent available to him in many other cases in which very much less money was involved and by which he might have provided that if he was not satisfied with the figure involved he would not be bound to go ahead with the deal. Clearly he was bound and so he has had to come in here to try to justify that provision in the agreement.
That is not the end of the story by any means. He has also bound himself to pay this money for a minority holding in the company, a holding that will preclude him from exercising the only kind of control that would justify State participation in this kind of operation. The Minister finds himself now in the position that he is going to have to pay this money and end up unable to insist on the mine being developed in the way he thinks it should be developed. He is subject to the decisions of other people. On a later amendment we will be going into more detail as to just how strong a right of decision will be vested in other people. At the moment the right of decision in this company is vested almost exclusively in a subsidiary of the Midland Bank, but whoever is going to be in the position of holding the shares, other than the Minister's is going to be in an impregnable position as regards the essential decisions to be made for the operation of this company. We know that much about the agreement and we know something else about it which is perhaps even more disturbing, and that is that this £9½ million is not going to develop anything in the company. It is being paid to the shareholders. It can be paid to the shareholders and the company can still be in a position of having no cash, the Minister having paid £9½ million.
It did not have to be so. The agreement could easily have provided that shares could be issued in such a way that the money was being paid into the company and the Minister was ending up with the same proportion of the shares but the money would have been going into the development of the company, not into the pockets of existing shareholders. That that was not done is very disturbing. One could speculate, perhaps unfairly to the Minister, as to why it was done as it was. The explanation is that the Minister, perhaps for what he thought were ideological reasons, was determined to go ahead with a deal like this and simply got lost in a commercial jungle where clearly he should not be let loose because he does not know what it is all about. The net effect is that he has produced an agreement and what we know of its contents is almost universally to the detriment of the taxpayer. He has produced an agreement which no competent person engaged in commercial life would ever sign.
Almost any drawback one can think of in such an agreement seems to be involved in it from the Minister's point of view—in other words, from the taxpayer's point of view—and yet the Minister says: "Pass this Bill. I will not tell you the terms of this agreement. You have, in effect, to approve of the agreement because a number of sections say this is to be done, subject to the agreement, but you are not going to be told the terms of the agreement". To me, this is a totally incredible situation. It is incredible that anyone would put that proposition forward here. But that has been done and the Minister has insisted on steamrolling the various provisions through and, having done so, then the responsibility should lie on the shoulders of those who made the agreement and those who steamrolled it through this House, and the Bill should show on its face that the agreement was not produced in this House and that we knew nothing of its contents other than the snippets we have extracted from the Minister or that have been dug out by diligence and inference from matters that were discovered.
The agreement is one that most people with any pretensions at all to commercial competence would never enter into. In due course, if it has not already become clear, it will become crystal clear to the general public that this was an agreement incompetently negotiated, an agreement which should never have been signed by any Minister of State, an agreement which has got the present Minister, whatever his motives were, into a totally unacceptable position, one from which he would, I guess, very much like to get out and one into which he would very much like not to have been put. I suspect that, when the real difficulties emerged, he found himself locked in and he could not do anything about it and so he just had to try to do the best he could, not a very good best, of adopting the tactic: "I will not disclose the contents of the agreement".
He is the first Minister in the history of the State who ever tried such a tactic. He has held himself up to be a person totally oblivious of the requirements of democracy, someone who wanted merely a rubber stamp from this House and the other House. This had a certain advantage in that it did not oblige him to come out fully with the whole story of the bad commercial deal he made. It did not oblige him to disclose the various clauses which could have been so much more competently negotiated. Mark you, what I am talking about would not have operated to the detriment of the people with whom the Minister was dealing. They could have had the same deal and the same benefits in due course from the Bill, and the Minister's position and the taxpayer's position would have been so much better if the deal had been competently negotiated. However, the Minister did not do that and he decided apparently to cover up as much of the incompetence as he could. I do not think he should have got himself into that position. I do not think he should have tried to cover up.
He has come in here and tried to brazen it out. If he has people to come in here behind him and vote his Bill through on that basis, then it is on that basis he will have to render an account in due course to those to whom all of us have to render an account in due course. In the meantime, those of us on this side of the House who have uncovered some of the patent defects in this agreement, who have laboured here to do so and who have drawn the attention of the Minister and of the House to those defects, are entitled to ask that we should not, even indirectly, be associated in the public mind with this incompetently negotiated agreement. It is in order to do that that I have moved this amendment. May I take it, Sir, that the Minister does not intend to reply?
I have a strange feeling that a volume of last month's debate has taken itself down, opened itself up and started to read itself because, of course, this is something we have been around and around and around. I described the situation as "No win". I just want to give again very briefly, since certain arguments have been repeated on the other side so often, the arguments in favour of the confidentiality of this agreement. I have instanced the IDA agreements, the SFADCo agreements, the Bord Gáis agreements and, most important of all in economic terms, agreements with the oil companies which are confidential not only in Ireland but all over the world. I will not be hamstrung in my commercial dealings. The State will have more and more commercial dealings and I will not be hamstrung in mine. Neither will I treat one company differently from another. I will not pillory one company in the way, for example, of the most recent interjection of Deputy Crowley. I will not treat one company differently from another. The State will have confidential agreements with many companies. This is all repetition.
The Chair asked that amendments Nos. 2 and 4 be taken together and that was declined. We now see the reason why it was declined. The amendment proposed is neither necessary nor relevant to the definition of the agreement. It has a political propagandist purpose which will add nothing to the law when it is enacted and I see no purpose in accepting this amendment. I accepted the last amendment when we finally got round to discussing it. This amendment would serve no purpose and I do not propose to accept it.
The Minister has continually accused this side of filibustering. The Minister showed by his attitude towards our last amendment that he was the one who was filibustering because he could so easily have indicated after Deputy Colley had spoken that he was accepting it. He decided not to do that. He has trotted out now the same old clichés about confidentiality. He says he does not want to be hamstrung in his commercial dealings and that the State will have more and more involvement in commercial dealings. My only hope is that the State will have no more involvements in commercial dealings if those involvements result in the Minister walking us into agreements like this one. There is no doubt in anybody's mind that we have got the worst end of the deal where this agreement is concerned and, if this matter goes to court, then the court will be entitled to the information sought in the amendment, namely, the terms of the agreement which were not made available to the Houses of the Oireachtas.
Without having available to us the contents of the agreement how can we pass any legislation in relation to it? Unless we see the agreement how do we know if there are provisions for obtaining planning permission, if there are provisions for the refusal of such permission and if there are provisions for the very important decision regarding the diversion of a river? Surely the Minister is not asking the House to rubber stamp such an agreement when we have no knowledge of it and when we have not got answers with regard to fundamental commercial questions? The Minister places a lot of stress on commerce and commercial dealings. By commercial dealings does he mean squandering the taxpayers' money? Unless we have the protection I mentioned with regard to our investment in the secret agreement we will be squandering the taxpayers' money.
Is there any provision in the agreement as to when or where a decision will be taken, or was taken, with regard to open-cast or underground mining? That will influence substantially the cost of the ore that comes from the ground. In these commercial dealings we are entitled to ask what protection have taxpayers for their money. What power has the Minister to enforce any guarantees from the directors of the company——
What has this got to do with the amendment?
The Deputy showed his ignorance about that issue last week when he tried to persuade the House that section 2 was not amended.
The Chair has repeatedly pointed out to Deputies on both sides of the House that we should not reflect on the intelligence of Members of the House.
We are entitled to know if the agreement has made any provision for the new shareholding of the subsidiary of the Midland Bank. We want to know the answer to a more sinister question, namely, if the Minister has protected the taxpayers' money in relation to Haras el Chorro, SA? What part do they claim in the agreement? We must remember that it was the diligence, the tenacity and the research of Deputy O'Malley that made available to us any little information we got. The little bit of information we gleaned from his investigations leaves one in no doubt about the non-viability of this "commercial dealing" the Minister was so quick to talk about. I hope we will not have any more such commercial dealings after this farce.
The Minister mentioned the IDA and An Bord Gáis—he was really scraping the barrel then—and he tried to draw a comparison between this agreement and any agreement that may be entered into with An Bord Gáis. However, the Minister has not answered one of the most important of all questions in any commercial dealing, namely, who will finance it? Deputy O'Malley's investigations found that all of the money being paid over by the State to the four shareholders will not go into the establishment and the working of the mine. That is some bonanza to spread around. We must take the view that there was a conspiracy in existence to pay £9.54 million of the taxpayers' money without revealing one line of the agreement entered into for payment of the money——
I am sure the Deputy will agree that the debate should be confined to arguments for or against insertion of the words in the amendment.
We must protect the Members of the House when this goes before the courts but the amendment is even more important in that a judge can take into account the fact that information was not made available to this House. What I have been spelling out to the House is the type of information that has not been made available to us.
We should not elaborate on that. As I have pointed out, the debate should be confined to arguments for or against insertion of the words concerned.
I realise that but in order to substantiate our argument for inclusion of these words we must show why it is necessary for a judge to have access to this kind of information before making a decision. It is also necessary for us to have this information before we can judge the commercial viability of such an agreement. It has not been given to us. In order to clear our name we have put forward this amendment. I do not know why the Minister has not revealed to the House the information we asked for. He is the last person I would make responsible for any commercial deal. If he is not prepared to reveal the protection the State has demanded in any commercial dealing, I can only assume that he is protecting himself more than the State. It is not in his interest to reveal any of the facts about this agreement. There is another question which is very important from the taxpayers' point of view. If and when this mine gets started, how soon after starting will the State get any money from it?
We are again moving from the relevance of the amendment so far as the Bill is concerned. Arguments ought to be directed to or against the amendment.
I am trying to show that there is a conspiracy afoot to pay out £9.54 million of the taxpayers' money without letting their representatives know what protection they have for that investment. This side of the House are trying to prove that we are not prepared to have any hand, act or part in relation to this Bill. That is why we want this amendment accepted. It really galls me to hear the Minister talk about commercial dealings. If this is an example of his commercial prowess, God help the State. No wonder prices have been soaring since he took over as Minister.
This has nothing whatever to do with the Bill before the House.
It shows the character of the Minister. He has been a disaster in relation to prices and he is a disaster in relation to this agreement.
We must keep to the Bill and the amendment before the House.
I can well understand how prices have soared since he took over.
The Deputy may not depart like that from the amendment before the House. He cannot enlarge the scope of the debate like that.
The Minister has already done that. He spoke about the IDA, the oil companies, An Bord Gáis and about Gaeltarra Éireann. I did not hear you pulling him up.
The Minister spoke about them in regard to agreements made.
That is exactly what I am talking about.
The Deputy seems to be dealing with prices and so on.
What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Apparently the Deputy is the goose.
The Minister is some gander. He has a long thick neck. He is the greatest chancer of all.
This type of language does not become the House. Such personal abuse does not enhance the debate.
I can well appreciate the Minister's anxiety for secrecy. The Russians trained him well. Secrecy is the sine qua non of those people.
The Deputy should not make those allegations and he knows it.
If they are not true, the Minister can deny them.
The point is that the Deputy should not make them.
You will have a full time job protecting the Minister.
The Chair does not take advice from anybody. The Chair exercises its own judgement in these matters and follows the rules of order.
A short while ago this Minister spoke about the ugly face of capitalism. He is now a bed fellow with four of the most prominent capitalists in the country. They have conned him and he is trying to con the House now into keeping the agreement secret. If he had any bit of decency left in him in regard to the dignity of the House, he would agree to the amendment. The Minister seems to find it very amusing.
I find the Deputy's reference to the dignity of the House very amusing.
The Minister has brought it into disrepute since he came in here. Perhaps another day I will go into the political ideology of the Minister. That is probably the fundamental reason for the mess in regard to this agreement.
We will stick to the Bill now.
It seems extraordinary that we are spending nearly £10 million and we do not know what return we are getting for it except possibly that the money given out is tax free. It does not go into the development of the mine. It can end up, for all we know, in the tax free haven of Panama. I asked the Minister, when we were discussing the previous amendment, to give us some information about who the directors are. He refused to do this as he has consistently done throughout the debate. When I talk about the dignity of the House I mean that. The Minister has brought the House into contempt since the first day he introduced the Bill. Thank God we have somebody like Deputy O'Malley to expose him. The Minister tried to discredit Deputy O'Malley by his allegations in relation to the shares in Tara.
Amendment No. 4 is before the House.
He will be shown now for what he really is.
(Dublin Central): I was glad to hear the Minister accepting the last amendment. If he intervened when the amendment was moved, the House would have been spared one hour or one and a quarter hours.
If the Deputies stuck to the matter before the House, we could have cleared that immediately.
(Dublin Central): If the Minister intervened earlier, delay would have been avoided.
The record will show that I intervened as soon as the names were referred to.
(Dublin Central): I have the very highest regard for some of the people mentioned in the amendment. Some of those people have made a major contribution to our economic expansion. As I already mentioned we would have been spared undue delay——
If the Deputy consults the record, he will see that as soon as the names were reached I accepted it.
(Dublin Central): The Minister had those in his possession during the past week.
The usual logic.
(Dublin Central): Even if we had known at the time of the circulation of the Bill that the agreement was not being made available some of this confusion might have been avoided. There is nothing in the Bill to indicate that the agreement will be made available. I am not qualified legally but as a businessman I would have taken it for granted that the agreement would have been available to us when discussing the Bill. We should not be asked to process a Bill without knowing what is in the agreement on which the Bill is based. The acceptance of this amendment would at least clear the minds of those other people who have yet to deal with the Bill. I am talking of the Seanad, the President and, possibly, the courts. I see no reason for not accepting the amendment. Its insertion would not detract in any way from the Bill but would merely clarify the situation for the benefit especially of those other people who will have to deal with it and who, consequently, would know from the beginning where they stand.
During the past six weeks many arguments, all of them genuine, have been put forward from this side of the House. We have shown our concern in this instance in which more than £9,500,000 is being invested by the State. While speaking on the previous amendment the Minister took me to task on the question of the transfer of 80 per cent of the shares and pointed out that the money would not be transferred until the shares were returned. It had not been my intention to undermine in any way this whole operation but we must have regard to the fact that the shares are not held by the people with whom the Minister dealt.
The Minister made it clear that the shares must be handed over free of charge.
(Dublin Central): I accept that but the Minister must be aware that the deal can complicate the transfer of shares.
The deal is that the shares be delivered free of charge, in other words, no money unless this condition is complied with.
(Dublin Central): The Minister may not be in a position to get back the shares.
The Deputy must keep to the amendment.
(Dublin Central): The Minister acted correctly in having that provision put into the agreement but what we are discussing here is hypothetical since we do not know if it will ever be possible to enact the legislation.
The Midland Bank are a huge consortium and they might very well insert clauses to suit themselves. If we had to go to court in this regard there might be a considerable delay in reaching a conclusion. Therefore, the whole matter may not be as simple as the Minister seems to indicate. The Bill may not result in the company being put into operation.
The Minister tells us he is satisfied that the secret agreement gives him full protection but the finger cannot be pointed at us on this side of the House if at a later stage there are accusations in regard to the agreement. Regarding the Bill as a whole we would be delighted if the development of the mine could begin as quickly as possible.
The Deputy must confine himself to amendment No. 4.
(Dublin Central): The Minister implied today that we are holding up the House and, in particular, holding up this Bill. We realise the importance of mineral development and we are conscious of the necessity to create as much employment as possible.
The Deputy must keep to the amendment.
(Dublin Central): Because of his refusal to grant a concession to this side of the House, the Minister is responsible for holding up the Bill. If details of the agreement had been revealed to us, the present situation would not have developed. It is important that we do not do anything to undermine public interest in investment, either foreign or home investment. Even at this late stage the Minister is in a position to make available the terms of the agreement. He has accepted amendment No. 3 and I was hoping that on this occasion he would display the same consideration and agree to the amendment before the House.
I join with my colleagues in appealing to the Minister to accept the amendment. I see no great obstacle to his acceptance of it. The amendment requests merely that certain words be added to make it clear that the agreement referred to in the Bill was not available to the Oireachtas during the course of the debate. I am surprised that the Minister seems to be refusing the amendment. It has no great ideological significance. It will not bring about any great change in the terms of the Bill. The Minister's mind always intrigued me and it intrigues me even more when he is resisting this very reasonable amendment. It only adds to the general public disquiet about this Bill and the Minister's reasons for not wanting to disclose the terms of the agreement to the public.
The Deputy has the last eight minutes.
The Minister's interjection is most unbecoming. I would take exception to it, but I am not surprised at it coming from the Minister.
When this Bill was first circulated to the Members of this House I read it with great interest and thought that some part of the correspondence had been omitted from my envelope. I expected a schedule to the Bill or in an explanatory memorandum or a third document the agreement which is the kernel of the whole Bill. I was absolutely amazed to discover that the documents which had been sent to me were similar to the documents sent to other Deputies and that they were all we were going to get and that the House was going to be asked to discuss a Bill which referred to an agreement without having the terms of that agreement made known to Members of the House. This is a most unprecedented situation and introduces something which would be a great danger to parliamentary democracy.
This amendment merely asks that the Bill in its final form shall make it known that this agreement was not available to the Members of the House while debating the Bill here. The Acts that are passed by Parliament are the main sources of reference and legislation, and if one must, as in this case, go back and search the debates to establish what the exact position was, it leaves a lot to be desired. It should be quite clear to any person who reads this Bill when it becomes an Act that the terms of this agreement which is referred to continuously in the Bill were not known when the Bill was debated. The Fianna Fáil Party are being most reasonable in seeking this change. During the Minister's brief contribution to this amendment he referred to the IDA, Gaeltarra Éireann, some oil companies, An Bord Gáis and some others in relation to secret agreements. I am not aware that the State have entered into any secret agreements where State money is being invested in oil exploration. If there are secret agreements which we have not been told about, the situation is a lot worse than we have discovered in the discussion on this Bill.
The Minister cannot make a comparison with the licensing arrangements regarding the blocks off the coast for exploration purposes because there is no comparison in relation to an investment of State funds as is happening under this Bill. To my knowledge no such agreements have been entered into by the State in regard to the investment of State funds in the exploration for oil. Are we now to have a situation where there may be many secret agreements which the Oireachtas and the people do not know about? This is a trend for which this Bill is setting a precedent and it is something which will cause great discomfort and confusion in the minds of the people. This attitude on the part of the Government is slowly undermining whatever confidence the electorate had and will redound to their own discredit when the electorate have the opportunity of passing judgment on the Government.
In the case of Gaeltarra Éireann whose headquarters are located in my constituency, I have some knowledge of the many agreements they have entered into with industrial concerns. The Minister's statement regarding confidentiality in my experience does not hold up. On any occasion when I requested information in regard to the shareholding by Gaeltarra Éireann in private or public companies, that information was made available. Any question I put to Gaeltarra Éireann regarding agreements they had entered into with industrial concerns was answered. I am not aware of any case where the information has been refused. During the course of this debate the Minister was challenged on that point by Deputy Colley. To my recollection, the Minister did not deny that information had never been refused.
This Bill is creating a dangerous precedent which is quite extraordinary. It is totally incomprehensible how mature elected public representatives can be asked to come into Parliament and discuss a Bill which refers to an agreement which is not being made available to them. It is naïve of the Government to have thought that they could get away with this without public comment on it.
Debate adjourned.