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Public Service Reform Plan Update

Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 30 September 2014

Tuesday, 30 September 2014

Ceisteanna (1)

Joe Higgins

Ceist:

1. Deputy Joe Higgins asked the Taoiseach when the last meeting of the Cabinet sub-committee on public service reform took place and when the next meeting is scheduled. [30898/14]

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Freagraí ó Béal (42 píosaí cainte)

The Cabinet Committee on social policy and public service reform met yesterday, 29 September.

In the statement of Government priorities 2014-16, the Taoiseach said the Government - Fine Gael and Labour - was now setting its key priorities and that priority number five was the rebuilding of trust in politics and public institutions.

In the week that is in it, when the Taoiseach wove such a tangled web that he does not really know where he stands by using and abusing a public institution and State body - the Irish Museum of Modern Art - what changes is he going to make in regard to putting the public services and the use of those institutions to advance the political interests of the major right wing parties in this State beyond the reach of sleaze, cronyism and favouritism? Is this a subject he thinks the Cabinet sub-committee should take up?

As it was the Irish Museum of Modern Art the Taoiseach abused, would he consider offering himself as an artistic installation there for a day, perhaps by going down and standing in stocks in sackcloth and ashes as atonement for his abuse of that institution?

The Government made a decision this morning, in respect of a memo brought forward by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, to deal with the changing of the model and structure by which ministerial appointments will be made. This has been agreed and approved by the Government. All of the positions on boards will be advertised openly on the State's portal, StateBoards.ie, which is operated by the Public Appointments Service, PAS. This means that every Minister will, in respect of the boards under the aegis of the Department, be required to set out the criteria, the conditions and the skills necessary for service on any of those boards. It is expected that every Department will advertise its vacancies and those criteria on the StateBoards.ie service.

While the appointments to the board will remain exclusively the responsibility of the Minister, the relevant statutory conditions will have been assessed elsewhere. For instance, where a number of non-remunerated vacancies might exist on a board, a Minister will receive a list of appropriately approved candidates with qualifications from the Public Appointments Service for consideration.

In the case of boards under the aegis of NewERA, we have ESB, Ervia, Bord na Móna, Coillte, EirGrid and Irish Water. Bord Gáis and Irish Water become Ervia. These are specialist commercial entities which require a specialist set of skills, perhaps accountancy, legal expertise, communications or data skills. These will be assessed, in consultation with NewERA, to verify what is being sought and the vacancies on these boards will be ring-fenced to the NewERA system.

The Minister of Finance has responsibility for a number of boards concerned with the Central Bank and a process of validation is required for those appointments.

The result of this will be that from 1 November this year, an entirely new regime applies. All of the public appointments advertised on StateBoards.ie will be vetted and validated in respect of the conditions set out for each of the boards under each Department and the Ministers will be supplied with a list of named, qualified, credible persons. This process will apply from 1 November.

I do not propose to take up the suggestion made by the Deputy.

The Taoiseach has been in government for three and a half years. Why are the proposals he has just made, which I have not yet had the opportunity to study, being proposed for 1 November, some three and a half years after he stood and promised his democratic revolution and the cleaning up of politics?

Both Fine Gael and the Labour Party are up to their necks in the cronyism stakes, with failed or unsuccessful council candidates for the Labour Party finishing up on boards and sitting councillors finishing up on other boards.

The Deputy put one in Europe.

It is business as usual. This is the same type of patronage and cronyism I have seen going on in Irish politics by the right wing political parties in the State for 40 years. What the Government is doing now is what Mr. Haughey and the rest of them and other Governments did over the past 40 years, yet it is three and a half years into office and it is now promising that from 1 November this business will be cleaned up. Can anybody believe there is any credibility attaching to that?

As the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, has pointed out on many occasions, there has been a raft of reforms here, including those on lobbying, the Ombudsman, FOI and StateBoards.ie. In respect of StateBoards.ie, an excess of 60 individual campaigns was undertaken, involving 2,500 expressions of interest - approximately 40 candidates per campaign. Some 200 appointments have been made from that system. In approximately one-fifth of the campaigns, no appointments were made from PAS applicants. In general, the PAS process related to from one to two vacancies on each State board.

By 1 November, every Department will have set out the criteria, standards and skills necessary for persons to serve on their boards and all of this information is transferred onto StateBoards.ie. This means the public will be have a transparent, accessible way of understanding the vacancies, the places to be filled, the criteria necessary and how to make an application. These applications will be assessed by the Public Appointments Service and not by any internal, political dynamic. Credible, qualified candidate names will then be submitted to the Minister in question for consideration.

The exclusive responsibility for the appointment lies with each Minister, but this system-----

Wrong; they are political appointments.

-----transfers the validation and assessment to an outside, independent organisation, so that when Ministers get names for appointment, they will have been assessed as suitably qualified and appropriate for the board on which they wish to serve.

The Taoiseach has outlined reforms on the nomination or appointments of citizens to the various State board, but we will wait to see the detail of these reforms before giving our view on them. This brings into sharp focus the function of the Cabinet sub-committee on public reform.

The Taoiseach appeared earlier to accept that Mr. McNulty's appointment to the board of IMMA was an abuse of the public appointments process and that has led the Taoiseach to bring in these reforms. I asked the Taoiseach earlier about the appointment of a former Fine Gael councillor to the board of Uisce Éireann - he happened to pick the example of Uisce Éireann as perhaps being a board that required some particular talents or skills. Can he tell us what particular skills this former Fine Gael councillor brought to that-----

We are straying a long way from the question, which was about the meetings of the Cabinet sub-committee that took place.

I am just trying to understand how all of this works. The Minister, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, also appointed a former Labour Party councillor to the Irish Aviation Authority, and the Taoiseach did not answer any of those questions when I asked him that earlier.

They can be brought up directly in another question.

All right. Can the Taoiseach outline the role and purpose of this Cabinet sub-committee, particularly in the light of this recent debacle, and how he sees it working within the overall Government structure?

I point out to the Deputy that the Cabinet sub-committee has already published two reports in respect of over 200 individual actions, and they are available for him to read, if he wishes. The role of the sub-committee is to provide a basis for cross-departmental co-ordination in the areas of social exclusion, social inclusion, poverty reduction and service delivery, including providing assurance about coherence in the engagement across Departments with all of the different target groups. The combination of social policy issues with the public service reform agenda will ensure that questions about how services should be reconfigured and tailored to guarantee their effectiveness will certainly be something that is of critical analysis.

For example, we had a very good meeting yesterday where the publication of a national dementia strategy was discussed and approved and where the national drugs strategy was considered in regard to how that should evolve beyond 2015 and 2016 in order to make preparations for dealing with the challenges that are there. The Cabinet sub-committee has done and is doing a great deal of work in these areas of social inclusion, poverty and homelessness, which obviously has implications for the greater Dublin area in particular but also in so many other areas around the country, where there are also homeless people and housing issues.

In regard to this question, and given what the Taoiseach said earlier in terms of the Minister, Deputy Howlin's announcement today, I point out that we had a similar announcement three and a half years ago. The Labour Party manifesto in 2011 stated it would:

...end the system whereby appointments to State boards are used as a form of political patronage and for rewarding insiders. In future, appointment to boards must be based on a demonstrable capacity to do the job.

The Fine Gael manifesto stated something similar. All political parties since the foundation of the State have appointed either members of the party or associates of the party to State boards - that is a fact. I can go through the first ten years, having studied it myself, and we can see what went on. Even today in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin does it quite regularly-----

There is the case of the Minister, Conor Murphy, and the appointment of Máirtín Ó Muilleoir to the board of Northern Ireland Water. I believe there were other appointments which ended up in legal wrangles due to the shenanigans that went on. I could say there are many quangos and community boards in Northern Ireland that have the Sinn Féin imprint. I am just making a statement. All political parties have been involved in it in Northern Ireland, in the Republic and in all democracies.

The big difference was that everyone signed up for a different politics at the last general election but the rhetoric that was articulated then and since has not matched the reality of what has happened. That is the point. The McNulty appointment is not actually about political patronage. It is a more profound issue of how a distinguished arts institution was undermined by the process of appointment. He was appointed not because he could serve the board; he was appointed in order to qualify him to run for the Seanad. That was the more fundamental issue which, in my view, separates it from the, if one likes, normal system for State appointments, which needs to be changed.

Is there a question? This is a speech.

The parliamentary question was asked by Deputy Robert Troy in July last and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has announced the changes today. However, to take his own Department, where I acknowledge there were only 22 appointments to two boards up to July, not one of them was of a public applicant. That is 0% in the percentage of public applicants------

What were the two boards?

This is from a parliamentary reply. I do not know the boards.

They are the ones that were statutorily provided for. One is the Public Appointments Service, PAS.

To continue, the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government made 177 appointments yet the number of vacancies advertised was nil and the number of public applicants selected was nil. I do not know what the then Minister, Mr. Hogan, was doing but he clearly did not believe in any of the rhetoric from before the election or any of the principles that both parties announced would be the basis for making public appointments. The Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources made 108 appointments since March 2011 and the number of vacancies advertised was nil, although 17 public applicants were selected. Out of 120 appointments made by the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, 28 were public appointments. Therefore, while different Ministries had different outcomes, we are looking at the most at one out of every five appointments across all Ministries being of public applicants.

Huge lip service is paid to all the talk about public advertising. The question is how valuable is this Cabinet sub-committee on public service reform, given all this was going on over the past three and a half years under its watchful gaze? The Minister has said that all future vacancies will be advertised on the State boards portal and that it "will be processed by way of a transparent assessment designed and implemented by the independent Public Appointments Service (PAS) to support the relevant Minister". Does this mean the Minister will still end up making the appointments?

Therefore, the power resides with the Minister anyway.

That is the law.

Yes, but the Government is not changing that fundamental point.

I am just trying to get clarity. There is a lot of smoke. All of this was said three and a half years ago and the performance did not match the rhetoric - that is the point I am making. How do we know that now, following today's announcement, it is going to be any different for the next year and a half? Clearly, some Ministers ignored completely the principles outlined by the Taoiseach, particularly the Ministers for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and the Environment, Community and Local Government, which more or less ignored what the Government was claiming it was doing with public sector appointments. Would we be better off abolishing the committee? Does the Taoiseach think there is any point in it meeting?

Does the Deputy read the reports of the committee?

No, I do not agree at all with that. The Cabinet sub-committee, as he is aware, is able to bring together different personnel from different Departments with a view to focusing on particular issues like homelessness, dementia or other social inclusion areas that need to be dealt with, be it anything from the post office network on.

The Deputy asked how we can now be sure this is going to happen. First, the Government will continue on with what it has already been doing in terms of ending corporate donations, radically reforming the local government structure, the reduction in the number of authorities from 114 to 31, the banning of political expenses, State cars, increments and pension entitlements, all of which has been done, as well as the introduction of gender quotas and the establishment of a constitutional convention, with a number of reports to come before the House.

Between now and 1 November, whatever appointments have to be made to boards, the Ministers will announce those publicly - in other words, Minister X might say, "We have three vacancies on board X". Rather than having to find out what actually applies, from 1 November, as the Minister pointed out, all of this will be clear on StateBoards.ie and all Departments will have set out the criteria for serving on the boards under their responsibility. As vacancies occur and people apply, that vetting process by PAS will be available to the Minister of the day. He or she still retains exclusive responsibility for the appointment of members to the board but those members in such cases are vetted, validated and certified as being competent people to serve on the boards in question.

It is a different model. It is a much more effective, streamlined and co-ordinated system and the public can check for themselves what vacancies are occurring on what boards, the criteria that apply and how they might apply if they wish to participate in that public service.

That is different from the others that are ring-fenced for NewERA or the commercial semi-State bodies where particular sets of skills might be required to serve on those boards.

In answering Deputy Joe Higgins's questions the Government has failed to see the point. We cannot pass judgment on the actual criteria used yet because we have not seen them. However, the problem is fundamental and it is this what the Taoiseach should be tackling. It is the fact that since the foundation of the State, the Minister has had the ultimate responsibility and Ministers, from whatever party, have continuously abused their right to patronage. There is absolutely no reason to believe that by setting new criteria, this abuse will not continue. This sounds suspiciously like the way judges are appointed. In a similar situation - over which a Government fell in the past - a body called the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board was set up. It is known in the Law Library as "JAABs for the boys". It was cosmetic legislation to fool the public as camouflage that something was changing in the appointment of judges. Nothing has changed. We still get nominees from a board and the Minister has the responsibility. Ministers from all sides have continuously abused that responsibility by appointing their cronies to the Judiciary.

Which judges does the Deputy have in mind?

I do not think I am allowed to name them and it would be utterly subversive and wrong if I were to do so. For a Minister to suggest it is very wrong.

Therefore, the Deputy impugns all of them.

We are getting away from the question.

Will the Taoiseach, please, forget about the camouflage, the criteria and the bodies he put in the middle? Will he announce in this House that the problem has been ministerial appointments and that he intends, as a great reformer and part of a great reforming Government, to end the system whereby Ministers have the facility to appoint their friends and cronies to State bodies? Take it out of the political arena and we will then believe him. Say, "Yes, the system has ended" because he knows from what happened when on this side of the House and this side of the House knows from what is happening on the other side, that no Government has been able to resist the temptation of abusing this responsibility and that there is absolutely no reason to believe the camouflage about which we are about to hear will fulfil that objective.

There is actually because the people who apply on StateBoards.ie apply on the basis that they know on which board they would like to serve and the conditions, criteria and skills set necessary to serve on such a board. It is not the Minister who assesses their validity to fit the criteria but the Public Appointments Service system. When it comes back to the Minister with a list of names, they are all deemed to be credible and suitably and appropriately qualified.

When the recommendation of the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board comes before the Attorney General and the Minister for Justice and Equality, the candidates have been assessed by the President of the High Court and an eminent panel. Obviously, they know them better than anybody else in terms of their qualifications and experience. Seven judges were appointed to the Court of Civil Appeal and the appointments were made by the President-designate, the Chief Justice and the President of the High Court. That list of eminent judges came before the Cabinet and was approved unanimously; therefore, things have changed; they are not the same as they were.

What the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has done is set out an entirely new model for State appointments to remove that element of politics such that all appointments will be credible and all appointees will be qualified and appropriate for appointment. It may well be that a Minister may say in keeping with his or her exclusive responsibility, "These people are well known or you do not have enough suitable applicants for what I think we need." Perhaps other applications come through on StateBoards.ie. It is a genuine attempt to transform a system that has been very unclear for many years to a position of clarity, assessment, validation and selection for service on the boards in question. As I said in respect of the Court of Civil Appeal, the seven member panel was selected by very eminent legal personnel.

It is very important for the Taoiseach to comment on the employment of a member of the board of Irish Water as a personal driver for one of his Ministers. Does this not show contempt for an already outraged people who are facing water charges from today? He appointed a member of Fine Gael who already held down two jobs in Waterford where 20% of the people were unemployed. That is appalling and outrageous. This is the only appropriate place in which I can bring the matter to the Taoiseach's attention. If he listened to the radio this morning and people in Waterford, he will know that they are completely outraged that this has happened. A man who already holds down two jobs and is a member of Fine Gael and a member of the board of Irish Water will be paid €625 a week to drive one of the Taoiseach's Ministers of State around. It is appalling.

I ask the Deputy to, please, resume his seat. He should raise the issue in some other way. The question is about meetings of the sub-committee on the public service.

While it has nothing to do with the question, the person mentioned as being the driver has resigned from the board of Irish Water.

Are we finished with these questions?

Did he take Irish Water with him by any chance?

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