I want to ask the Taoiseach a number of questions concerning the appointment of Mr. McNulty to the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Deputy Heather Humphreys. Yesterday, the Taoiseach's attempt in the Dáil to bring clarity to the matter did not succeed and has raised far more questions than answers. There has been a lack of clarity. To paraphrase what has emerged, it seems that Mr. McNulty in his interview with the Taoiseach said he was interested in becoming a member of a cultural body. He was interviewed by the Taoiseach for the Seanad nomination and, mysteriously, Fine Gael officials became aware of his desire to serve on such a body. They then sent a memo or CV over to the Minister, Deputy Heather Humphreys, saying "Put him on a cultural body". She then, in great haste, decided to put him on the board of IMMA with another person. The entire process of nominating him to the Seanad, as a Fine Gael process, was completely and absolutely separate to the process of his nomination to the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. That is what we have heard at this stage.

I do not know whether the Taoiseach was aware that the Minister, Deputy Heather Humphreys, was asked by Fine Gael officials or was going to appoint Mr. McNulty to the board of IMMA. That brings into question the Minister's role. Why will she not do interviews on this matter? Why will she not come before the House and give a comprehensive statement on it? When did she receive the request from Fine Gael officials to appoint him to the board of IMMA? Who mandated them to make that request of the Taoiseach? Why did she act with such haste in increasing the size of the board to facilitate his appointment, rather than just wait for a casual vacancy to arise and then fill it in the normal way?

There is a range of questions but I only want to ask the Taoiseach one and I would appreciate a very clear answer. I asked it yesterday, as did Deputy Adams, but we did not get a clear answer. Did the Taoiseach, or somebody on his behalf in Government Buildings, ask Fine Gael officials to tell the Minister, Deputy Heather Humphreys, to appoint Mr. McNulty to a cultural body? Yes or no?

My job is to lead a Government that is sorting out our finances and get our country turned around. I would have thought the Deputy might want to talk about the live register figures this morning but he does not.

We will come to that.

I have listened to the Deputy's comments and he made three points. First, he mentioned about asking a Minister to make an appointment. Second, he mentioned telling a Minister to make an appointment and, third, he said that a candidate had expressed an interest in being appointed. I have dealt with all of this and I have accepted responsibility. I have apologised for the entire process. I am going to fix that and oversee it.

I asked the Taoiseach one question.

I will tell Deputy Martin one thing now. I am actually sick and tired of a position where we have had a flawed process for years in this country. Because of the flaw in the process, people who want to give service can be labelled as lackeys, hacks or cronies.

This is the forum of the Dáil. I heard a name on national radio this morning of a young man appointed to a State board who was deemed to be eligible on the basis of having worked in a bar or having supervised a pool room. I know the young man in question.

That is why he was appointed.

I saw him grow from a primary school lad to the adult he is now. That young man has a B.Sc. honours degree as well as an M.A. in innovation and management. He did his stint in Brussels. As many other students did, he worked in a bar for the summer.

What about answering the question?

He is talking down the clock.

He applied for a job with a multinational.

We never said anything about him.

I want to make the point. I am going to make the point. He applied for a job in a multinational with cloud computing. There were 5,000 applications and less than ten were accepted of which his was one. The point I am going to make to Deputy Martin is one that he will appreciate. He wanted to do his public duty and give service but because the firm does not give him time off, he took ten days' holidays to attend to his public service duty. Yet he is branded as a crony and a lackey, which is wrong. I am sick of that situation and now we are going to change it. From 1 November, this will not apply any more.

In his opening question, Deputy Martin made another point. When I interviewed John McNulty - who was very forthright again this morning on radio and is an excellent candidate - I never discussed anything with him about cultural boards or any other boards. I discussed with him his potential as a Senator to do a political job because this was a political seat for the Fine Gael Party, which arose from the election of Deirdre Clune to the European Parliament. That assertion was made yesterday evening as well. John McNulty never discussed with me anything to do with boards, culture or anything else. We discussed the operation of the Seanad and his capacity to be a good Senator and serve in the area he comes from.

And his qualifications?

The answer to that question is that there was no instruction given to the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. She herself read his qualifications and credentials and appointed him, as she was entitled to do, as a member of the board.

It was the tooth fairy.

Order.

As John McNulty said himself, he did not know at the time he was appointed whether or not he was going to be a candidate for the Seanad.

The boards are being stuffed.

He was a person who was being considered for nomination but he did not know. As far as I am concerned, we need to move on. This was a flawed process.

I tell you lads, if you want to have a long debate sometime over what happened over the years we can do that but it is not for today. This process has been flawed and will now be fixed. I want to see a situation where people in our country, wherever they come from, who want to serve on boards and do public duty can do so without being branded because of the flawed process. They should be allowed to do their job so we will fix that and make the process absolutely transparent and accountable with an external examination of credentials. We will move on from there.

We must have order for those asking questions as well as for the replies.

I will quote what the Taoiseach said in his reply to me yesterday. He said: "During the course of the process of validating his eligibility, Mr. McNulty expressed a wish to serve on a cultural body because he was intending to serve, if elected, to the Cultural and Educational Panel." A second ago, the Taoiseach flatly contradicted what he said yesterday. He said then that he had no conversation good, bad or indifferent with Mr. McNulty in relation to a cultural body.

Porkies.

In my opening remarks to the Taoiseach I did not ask about any other appointments. I only asked about Mr. McNulty's appointment to IMMA. It is the only question but the Taoiseach went down a diversionary route. This story is unravelling as it gets made up. One gets a terrible sense that people are trying to piece together and concoct a story that ends up blaming Fine Gael officials. Who mandated the Fine Gael officials to go to the Minister, Deputy Heather Humphreys, and say that Mr. McNulty wants to be appointed, and should be appointed, to a cultural body? Who mandated them to do that? Is the Taoiseach seriously suggesting that senior headquarter officials in Fine Gael went off, without his knowledge or endorsement, and said to the Minister "Appoint him"? Did any other names come from the Fine Gael officials, other than Mr. McNulty's, to be appointed? Look at the window we are talking about. We are talking about a few days between his nomination to contest the Seanad by-election on the Taoiseach's behalf and his nomination to IMMA.

There was no casual vacancy in IMMA because the Government had limited the number of board members to nine. With great haste, the Minister decided out of the blue-----

Make it 11.

-----to appoint Mr. McNulty to the board. Fine Gael officials decided out of the blue to suggest to the Minister that he should be appointed. Apparently they were not mandated by anybody. It is a complete mystery. Correspondents asked the Taoiseach's spokesperson yesterday who asked the Fine Gael officials to tell the Minister to nominate Mr. McNulty. The reply from the Taoiseach's spokesperson was: "You had better ask them." All I am looking for is the truth about what happened.

Has the Deputy a question?

Perhaps if we had got it early on last week, there would be no need for any of this. Will the Taoiseach just return to the basic question: who asked the Fine Gael officials to ask the Minister to appoint Mr. McNulty to the board of IMMA?

The Deputy has taken a wrong line again. I spoke to Mr. John McNulty about his capacity to be considered for nomination to the Seanad. When I gave my imprimatur to indicate we should consider nominating him, the Fine Gael system of validating candidates took over from there. We had already set up, internally in the party, a sub-committee of the executive council to consider names for nomination to the Seanad. There were 44 nominations submitted, or 29 people. Therefore, 29 were being considered. Obviously, the Fine Gael personnel working on this became aware in the course of the conversations with Mr. McNulty that he indicated he would like to serve on a cultural board if he intended to be a candidate for a cultural and educational panel. As he said himself this morning, he did not know when he was appointed by the Minister to the board of IMMA that he would be a candidate for the Seanad. My point yesterday, which I made to the Deputy clearly, concerned accepting the fact that the process within the Fine Gael system was itself flawed because the official dealing with this did not go back to the sub-committee of the executive council. That was the cause of great angst and a cause of concern to me.

Go back to it for what?

Because they took it upon themselves to do that.

It is a case of having accepted responsibility, having apologised for standards having slipped and of doing something about it and fixing it in general. Therefore, I do not accept the Deputy's assertion at all. The position here, which I made perfectly clear, was that the appointment to the board should not have happened because Mr. McNulty was being considered as a candidate for nomination to the Seanad.

But the Taoiseach told the officials he was the candidate.

The point is that those associated with the internal mechanics of IMMA then said that if a person is nominated for the Seanad, he must stand down from the board. I have accepted that in a general way as Head of Government and through fixing the internal mechanics of Fine Gael Party business, which is not a matter for here. Yesterday, the Government made a decision to have a new framework, starting from 1 November, for all public appointments to be publicly advertised and externally validated, whereby every Minister will set out the conditions and criteria that will apply for each board under his or her Department's remit. Therefore, we will not have the system that applied since the foundation of the State. In the meantime, any board appointments that must be made between now and November will be announced by the relevant Minister so everybody will know that vacancies exist on certain boards. It is a case of accepting that this system is flawed in general and that we need to reform it. We have made the Government decision and it will be implemented from 1 November on www.stateboard.ie so every member of the public, be he in Gorey, Wexford or otherwise, who wishes to do public service on a board can check the relevant details. People will know the boards, vacancies, criteria, skills and required conditions and they will be verified by the Public Appointments Service. Names sent to a Minister will already be authenticated as the names of people of quality fit to serve on a board. I hope that puts an end to what occurred during Deputy Martin's time and everybody else's time-----

No, it does not.

I must call Deputy Adams.

-----when the flaw in the system allowed for people to be pilloried as cronies. If Deputy Martin wants a debate of considerable length on what happened in the past-----

I tabled a special notice question last week and it was refused.

-----he should have it when matters are less pressing in respect of the changes we have to make to get our country right. He and I must deal with the fragile situation in Northern Ireland, and the Government must deal with the budget in just ten days. We have to deal with a range of challenges for our country.

If the Taoiseach had told the truth last week, we would not be here discussing this.

I have accepted responsibility.

For what?

We have apologised, we are doing something about it and we are fixing the problem, not just in this case but for all others for many years ahead.

The Taoiseach says he has many more important issues to deal with but he is the Taoiseach and cannot dictate to the Opposition what questions we ask. Yesterday he told the Dáil there were 29 nominees to the Seanad vacancy for which he interviewed Mr. John McNulty. Was he the only Fine Gael nominee he interviewed? Yesterday the Taoiseach said that during the course of the validation and eligibility process, Mr. McNulty expressed a desire to serve on a cultural body. Today the Taoiseach says he did not raise this with him. To whom did he express that desire? Can the Taoiseach tell the Dáil who forwarded Mr. McNulty's CV to the Minister, Deputy Humphreys? Was anyone else's CV forwarded to her? Who authorised the sending of Mr. McNulty's CV to the Minister?

The Taoiseach states the Minister appointed Mr. McNulty to the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in her own right. In other words, he implies it had nothing to do with him, and that there were two separate processes. However, the Government quota of nine nominees to the board was already filled. Therefore, the nominations the Minister was about to make breached the Government's ceiling. I note the absence of Labour Ministers in the Chamber again. Was the Labour leader, the Tánaiste, consulted on this?

The Taoiseach also states he accepts responsibility for the Fine Gael Party officials bringing Mr. McNulty's interest in serving on a State board to the attention of a Minister, but he says it was nothing to do with him and that it was a separate process. If it was nothing to do with him, how is he responsible?

I was responsible in two ways, first as leader of the Fine Gael Party and second as Taoiseach. In respect of the Fine Gael Party, I have already pointed out that the system that the party had in place internally was not followed through. I noted reports today in some of the newspapers suggesting, for instance, that members of the executive council of Fine Gael were disappointed that there was a perception that they were being blamed. The fact of the matter is that when former Senator Deirdre Clune was elected to the European Parliament, a vacancy arose in the Seanad. The sub-committee of the executive council considered the position. There were 44 nominations, or 29 names, submitted, and the executive council made two recommendations. Subsequently, Deputy McGinley said he was going to retire. That left a vacancy for a major political representative for half of Donegal. I looked at Mr. McNulty's credentials and said he was a candidate who would fit the bill in terms of work in the Seanad. I discussed the workings of the Seanad and its political agenda with him. We never discussed anything about cultural boards. In the course of the validation process and preparing the criteria, the Fine Gael personnel did not go back to the executive council. I was upset about that because it was set up for that purpose. I accepted responsibility for that flaw in that system and am rectifying it.

In a broader sense, I now want to move on with the reform agenda. The Government has already carried out reforms in terms of corporate donations, gender balance, gender quotas and freedom of information. All of these issues have been dealt with, and here is another aspect of political reform that needs to be dealt with in everybody's interest. There are very good people who will not serve on public bodies or boards in any circumstances because of the likelihood of their being pilloried as being associates of political parties, cronies or otherwise.

That is why an external, independent validation of all of these is necessary.

Deputy Adams made the point that the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Deputy Humphreys, breached the ceiling in terms of the number of personnel serving on the State boards. In the case of State boards, the Government made a commitment, which has not been followed through fully, that numbers on boards would be reduced from 15 members to nine members. That has not been followed through because many of the cultural institutions fought valiantly for the retention of their independence. Some of them were quite vociferous on that. The National Concert Hall Bill is on the A list for determination during this session.

There were six vacancies on the board of IMMA and the Minister chose to make two appointments. She made them in her own right as Minister, based on the credentials of the candidates.

In a hurry.

She does not have to inform me of every appointment made to every board.

In the case of chairmen of boards, the Government changed the rules and chairmen must come before the relevant Oireachtas committee to see what the applicant brings to the board.

I am not informed of every individual appointment made for non-remunerated positions on State boards, where there are thousands of positions to be filled over the years. However, from now on all of that process is removed from politics and politicians. All the positions will be publicly advertised and externally verified.

The Minister will have the final say.

Every Minister will set out the criteria, the qualifications and the skills necessary to serve on all of the boards under his or her responsibility. That information will all be posted on www.stateboards.ie and the public will have full transparency and accountability there. Every person appointed must be independently assessed and verified.

In regard to commercial semi-State boards, where particular skillsets are required, for instance in the NewERA sector which deals with Ervia, Bord Gáis, Bord na Móna and so on, consultations with NewERA will set out the specific skillsets required, such as accountancy, legal qualifications, data management, business acumen or whatever. Following that those specialised appointments will be made. This is a major change in the system.

What I want to see resulting from all of this is that State board service and public duty service will not be seen to be in any way reproachable. It should be entirely above reproach and I hope to oversee that through the decision the Government made yesterday.

The Taoiseach said that three years ago.

Often when the Taoiseach is asked a question here, he responds by saying, "This is a very complex issue", as if it was beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals on this side of the House. I am trying to keep this simple. I asked the Taoiseach a series of straightforward questions which he ignored completely. Was Mr. John McNulty the only Fine Gael nominee the Taoiseach interviewed? Please answer this question.

The Taoiseach says Mr. McNulty expressed his desire to serve on a cultural body, but has said today that Mr. McNulty did not raise that with him. I repeat my question. Who did he express that desire to? The Taoiseach is bound to have checked this out and to have asked someone about it. Will he tell the Dáil? Paddy wants to know; Patricia wants to know. Will the Taoiseach also tell the Dáil who forwarded Mr. McNulty's CV to the Minister, Deputy Humphreys?

The system.

Who authorised this? Was the CV of anyone else forwarded to her? In response to my earlier question, the Taoiseach said, answering a question I did not ask, that he decided Mr. McNulty would be a good candidate for the nomination for the Seanad vacancy. Did he decide this before the Minister received the proposition that Mr. McNulty should be nominated to the board of IMMA?

Did he order it?

Now to the crux, who recommended to the Minister that Mr. McNulty should be nominated to the board of IMMA?

It is not a complex issue. No, John McNulty was not the only person I interviewed. Some of the 29 approached me themselves and I spoke to them about their views as to whether they might be considered. John McNulty was one person to whom I gave a lengthy interview, because of the fact that Deputy McGinley-----

He was the chosen one.

-----had announced his proposed retirement. It is not complex. The Fine Gael Party set up a structure within its executive council of a sub-committee to deal with all of the names put forward.

The Taoiseach is here as Taoiseach and should not confuse the two roles.

That sub-committee prepares a case for those candidates it thinks are very good. The sub-committee did that.

The point I made when answering questions here yesterday was that after I spoke to John McNulty, the process kicked in for validation within that structure and that the executive council was not reported to nor informed, nor was I.

Yes, I said he was a good candidate, he is a good candidate and I have heard him speak since. He was one of a number of names being considered for-----

For IMMA.

-----for nomination to the Seanad-----

I am asking the Taoiseach about IMMA.

-----when he would have been appointed to the board of IMMA, if the Deputy lets me answer. As I said to the Deputy, Mr. McNulty himself said this morning that he did not know that he was going to be the candidate when he was appointed to IMMA by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht in her own right as Minister.

Who sent his CV to the Minister?

The CV was prepared by Fine Gael personnel in Fine Gael headquarters and forwarded to the Minister by personnel. The point I am making is simple. The system that was in place was flawed and has not worked. I have changed that and we are moving on to a much broader reform policy to deal will all public appointments.

Please allow the Taoiseach respond. A question was asked and he is replying to it.

Some of the people on the Fianna Fáil side who approached me in the past three months about personnel they wanted appointed to various boards might now reflect on what is happening on that side as well.

We have spent two days asking who sent the CV to the Minister, but the Taoiseach will not provide an answer.

The point is the system is flawed. I have accepted responsibility on my watch. Standards slipped and I am unhappy about that. John McNulty himself spoke out clearly and cogently about this yesterday. I am fixing the process internally and that is a matter for Fine Gael. In the broader sense, for the country, we are moving on to a big reform programme where we will put an end to the flawed system which allowed for people who want to give public service to be branded as lackeys and cronies.

If Members want a lengthy debate on this issue some time, we will give that to them.

On a point of order, I asked the Taoiseach straightforward questions on three occasions, but he has failed or refused to answer them. I put the question again. Who sent Mr. McNulty's CV to the Minister and who authorised that?

That is not a point of order.

I ask the Chair to rule on that.

It is not a point of order.

But the Taoiseach will not answer the question.

The Taoiseach needs to answer the question.

Let me repeat again, it is not a point of order, and I am not responsible for replies Taoisigh or Ministers give. I must ask the Deputy to resume his seat.

Chuir mé ceist ar an Taoiseach ach níor thug sé freagra dom.

Tá a fhios agam. I call Deputy Joan Collins.

On a point of order-----

I will not hear any more points of order.

On a point of order-----

It better be in order.

It is a correction of the Dáil record. Yesterday, we had a statement from the Taoiseach which conflicts with his statement today in regard to the interview he had with Mr. McNulty. He said:

I interviewed John McNulty, felt he was an excellent, outstanding candidate who was well qualified. During the course of the process of validating his eligibility, he expressed the wish to serve on a cultural body.

Today, the Taoiseach said he did not say any such thing to him at all. Either what he said today is wrong or what he said yesterday is wrong. We need the record corrected.

Deputy Martin should resume his seat. I call Deputy Collins.

The correction of the record is a valid point to raise under Standing Orders.

Deputy, please resume your seat.

The Taoiseach is prepared to correct it now.

If the Taoiseach wants to come in, he may.

When I spoke yesterday, I was speaking about the entire process. I can confirm to the Deputy that when I spoke to John McNulty in regard to his being considered as a person who might be nominated for the Seanad, he did not raise any question of being appointed to any cultural board.

Who did he raise it with?

He did so later on when the Fine Gael personnel were dealing with the preparation of his CV and he expressed his interest in serving on a board.

The Taoiseach signed his nomination paper.

He did not say anything to me about that, and I correct the record in that regard. If I confused Deputy Martin, I am sorry.

I call Deputy Joan Collins.