SEANAD REPORT:SHANE ROSS (Ind) said he could not understand how the Government was prepared to stand over a situation where the non-executive directors of CIÉ were giving "two fingers" to an Oireachtas committee.
He thought it was possibly unprecedented and indefensible for a parliamentary body to be told that directors of this semi-State had refused to attend a sitting to answer questions about the way CIÉ was governed.
Demanding that the Minister for Transport attend the House to address the issue, he said CIÉ was being investigated for good reasons – “they found some corruption inside themselves” – and the board had not seen the report that had been commissioned by certain executives at a cost of €500,000. Neither had the Minister.
Now the non-executive directors, who were paid from State funds and who were ministerial appointees, were saying to the joint committee on transport “two fingers to you guys, we’re not coming in, we’re not telling you what’s happening”.
CIÉ received an annual subsidy of €300 million, yet “its board says we can go and jump in a lake when we ask them what’s happening to that particular money”.
If the corporate governance of semi-States was going to be just used to appoint political hacks who refused to be accountable to the Oireachtas, there was no point in having joint committees at all.
Seanad leader Donie Cassidy said the directors’ non-appearance posed a serious challenge to the committee system. “I know there quite possibly is a very good reason for this happening. I’ll certainly endeavour to find out.”
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Junior minister for equality Mary White suggested that the Dáil and Seanad might consider a six-week automatic pairing for members who had just given birth. She said many members, particularly women, had stressed the difficulty of combining their work in the House with the demands of family life.
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Minister of State for Children and Youth Affairs Barry Andrews accused Rónán Mullen (Ind) of indulging in dangerous criticism in relation to mandatory reporting of child abuse.
Mr Mullen said there had been a lot of talk about the past failures of the Archbishop of Armagh in the context of the reporting of clerical child abuse. Yet the State was saying that it still did not believe that there should be a requirement for people to report crimes involving child sexual abuse to gardaí because that would not necessarily lead to more convictions.
Mr Andrews said this was “dangerous nonsense”.
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