Senator O'Leary in his excellent contribution torpedoed some of the Irish Shipping fleet, and I concur with everything he said. I discussed this Bill today at a meeting of my own parliamentary party and we are unhappy with this semi-State body, not alone because of the way they have run their business in recent times but in their accountability to the Minister responsible and indeed to the Minister for Finance. We realise that at present Irish Shipping are in a critical financial situation, which is one of the reasons that this House facilitated the introduction of this legislation — to stop all our ships being torpedoed for lack of finance. In doing so, it is appropriate that the Houses of the Oireachtas who pass legislation involving a considerable amount of taxpayers' money should express our reservations about the way this company have been run, especially in recent times. I am concerned because taxpayers' money usually refers to the PAYE sector, who seem to carry a disproportionate amount of taxation. They would like us to be responsible when we pass an enabling Bill to allow additional borrowing in the sum of £45 million. I agree with Senator Ryan in his comment about the original success of Irish Shipping and I also join in commending them for their previous performances.
Senator Ryan said that when they had been investigated previously by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Semi-State Bodies they were perfectly happy with the running of this company. But it is almost three years now since they have been subjected to the critical eye of the Joint Oireachtas Committee which have responsibility to the Houses to see that all bodies under our control are subject to the correct spending of money or in the management of the companies for which they are responsible.
Arising from the recent decision of the Joint Oireachtas Committee that they would invite representatives from these various companies on a twice yearly basis, I hope that that committee — I do not know if it is appropriate to call on them to do so — should investigate Irish Shipping Limited as a matter of extreme urgency as many people on both sides of the House would like to see the decisions made accountable to the Houses of the Oireachtas. The decisions that they made regarding long-term charter agreements in the Minister's own words proved disastrous. The facts alone speak for themselves. Whereas we have possibly a total of 12 ships carrying the Irish flag we discovered that nine of them are foreign owned. They are manned by foreign crews and carry out a lot of their business in foreign waters at the expense of the Irish taxpayer.
The Minister said that the company informed him that replacing the crews of these vested ships would incur an additional expenditure of £500,000 and additional operating costs of £1.6 million. At least we could stand over that kind of expenditure on the basis that not alone would they be providing employment for all the unemployed crews at various ports throughout the country, particularly in Cork, and could justify the expenditure on social and economic grounds. It certainly would be much more acceptable to have a deficit incurred because of that and the creation of employment. Irish Shipping create very little employment in our economy and it is unacceptable that a large amount of this money which is now being made available to them will be spent for the benefit of other people.
I am pleased to see that they have at least made an effort to renegotiate some of the contracts they had entered into and whereas we may not be privy to the total amount of money involved in these previous commitments they had entered into I have no doubt that it runs into possibly a hundred million pounds. I am glad they showed some initiative in renegotiating these contracts because otherwise bringing in a Bill like this would be unacceptable. If Irish Shipping want to act in a responsible manner and if they are accountable to the Minister for the kind of money they require or are spending we must ask serious questions of the management, the chief executive officer or whoever made these decisions in the past.
Whoever makes the decisions should be responsible on a commercial basis. Any other commercial organisation who conducted their business in this way would have to answer to somebody. As Senator O'Leary said, we are asking that they should be answerable to the Minister for Finance and, indeed, to Deputy Mitchell, the Minister present. That is the least we would expect. What worries me about the intolerable decisions that were made is that the first people to suffer were the employees at the lower level in this company, the crews working on the ships on rates of remuneration that could, at least, be called questionable. As the Minister has extended the limit of credit to this company, we are expecting the chickens to come home to roost or the ships to come into port and that their crews and management will be counted.
The decision to purchase the hydrofoil was most extraordinary. It may have been made by B & I and not by Irish Shipping but these are the kind of decisions we must question. A child could prove that it is not possible to float that kind of ship, boat or whatever one likes to call it, in the waters for which it was purchased. I hope that when the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Commercial State Bodies have an opportunity to investigate the workings of Irish Shipping someone will be held responsible for the errors, deliberate or otherwise which have been made over the past couple of years and which have cost the taxpayers so much. The crews who have been probably the hardest working people in Irish Shipping should not suffer, as indeed they have suffered, from redundancies which have taken place arising from some of the decisions.
I realise we have a statutory obligation to ensure that until such time as we can investigate the workings of this company we have aresponsibility to ensure their survival. It is important to have a shipping company which will carry our flag with pride throughout the world in trade and commerce. Because of that, I lend my support to the Bill, on the understanding that the Minister will be passing on our comments.
Section 2 deals with the remuneration of the chief executive officer and other employees of the company. Do I take it from this section that it is possible that heretofore other levels of remuneration had been decided without the decision or permission of the Minister? If so, I welcome this section and I hope it will benefit crew members who I hope are getting the proper remuneration for the kind of work they do and that they will be appropriately compensated under this section. Possibly the Minister can outline for me whether in fact the reason for putting this section into this Bill is because these people were obviously making decisions on the amounts of pay which they were able to give themselves without recourse to us. In view of some of the decisions made, those payments would be questionable.
I commend the Minister for his forthright speech on this subject. I am also confident he will use the enthusiasm he has shown in his dealings with semi-State bodies in trying to make them as self-sufficient and commercially viable as possible, taking into account the social factors from an employment point of view and the economic factors which obviously the board of management had not taken into account in the past. Normally I would be a defender of semi-State bodies on principle; they are the nearest we have to public ownership in this area and people are often very quick to condemn the public sector in this regard for making decisions which cost the taxpayers a lot of money. This company come into that category and I am not slow to criticise them because I feel it is justifiable. It is a pity that we have arrived at that stage, that we should have criticisms of this nature being levelled at a company who are directly responsible to us but, as the Minister said, they have ignored their responsibility to us. Indeed, some of the people involved have publicly denied any responsibility to us. I should like to remind them — because this is the only forum in which we as Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas can remind them — that they have a responsibility to us, to the Minister and to the taxpayer whom we all represent. We would be neglecting our duty if we did not spell out to people who run boards like this on our behalf that if they run them on a commercial basis they must accept the commercial consequences.
Senator O'Leary has called for their dismissal and for other stringent measures to be taken. The Minister should not be slow to look at it because if that is justifiable he will have the support of the House in doing so. Other people are very quick to condemn the public sector and most of the problems in the public sector can be traced back to management and the workers often come in for criticism although nine times out of ten they are not responsible. Management are generally responsible for some of the decisions. The workers are the first to take the stick from the public and the first to suffer in disastrous economic and critical financial situations as Irish Shipping have found out. The first person to suffer there is the man on the deck, I resent that.