Travers Report: Presentation Vol. No. 44
Deputy Gormley: I appreciate that Mr. Travers does not have back-up staff and I thank him for appearing before the committee and for producing his report. I would like to clarify a number of points before I raise more substantial questions. Did Mr. Travers have discussions with the Tánaiste about the terms of reference or the report itself and could he elaborate on those?
Regarding the meeting held on 16 December, which I see as pivotal, it strikes me that the Ministers of State, Deputies Callely and Tim O’Malley, acted on assumption. Deputy Callely assumed that the advisers and Department officials would brief the Minister, while Deputy Tim O’Malley assumed that the issue would be dealt with as a matter of course. I agree with Deputy McManus that Mr. Travers’s account and his conclusions differ. He deals with administrative responsibility but there appears to be a complete lack of communication between the Ministers of State and the Minister for Health and Children. Does Mr. Travers agree there appears to be a complete lack of communications between the Ministers of State and the Minister? I asked the Tánaiste whether any meetings were held between the Ministers of State and the Minister but did not receive a reply. Perhaps Mr. Travers also asked this question of the Ministers. Does he agree it would make sense that the political heads of a Department meet on a regular basis to discuss issues? I assume that weekly meetings should take place. These people seem to trod around in the dark without speaking to each other. The Minister does not read his briefs. The issue of maladministration also applies to Ministers.
Mr. Travers: The terms of reference had been drafted when I was asked to undertake the report on 16 December. Upon being asked to examine them I suggested one or two changes which were then incorporated in the terms of reference. These changes involved definitional matters including relevant persons and to ensure that I would improve my access to information through the co-operation of those to whom I directed my inquiries.
Deputy Gormley: Did Mr. Travers talk to the Tánaiste personally about this?
Mr. Travers: I talked to a number of her advisers on the issue. They, in turn, were in contact with the Attorney General’s office on drafting the terms of reference. As the first three chapters of the report comprised its factual basis, I made them available to a number of people including the Tánaiste, Ministers and the Secretary General of the Department.
Deputy Gormley: When were they made available to these people?
Mr. Travers: I do not have the exact date but it probably occurred in January or February. Elements of the report which describe my discussions with Ministers, officials and others were made available to the relevant parties to ensure that my account was accurate. This material was primarily made available to the Ministers and the Secretary General but also to the two officials referred to in the report, one of whom claimed to have seen the document in the Minister’s office and the other of whom claimed to be unaware of it being there. I agreed with both of those officials that the material of the report reflected our discussions. In that sense the report was discussed with people. I made a copy of the completed report available to the Tánaiste on Friday, 3 March, at which time I discussed it with her. I made one or two changes to the report over the subsequent weekend before submitting it.
Deputy Gormley: Did the changes come on foot of the discussion with the Tánaiste?
Mr. Travers: No, they did not. I informed the Tánaiste that I had not had the opportunity to read the document thoroughly and that I would like to do so. The letter I sent to the Tánaiste drew attention to two issues regarding changes I made in the report after reading it over the weekend. This letter is included at the beginning of the report.
I assumed that Ministers of any Department held regular meetings so I did not inquire whether this was indeed the case. I did not explore this matter in detail with the Minister or the Ministers of State. I asked the former Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Deputy Callely, whether he had followed up the statement he made at the meeting of 16 December on briefing the Taoiseach and the Minister on the charges issue. He informed me that he had mentioned the issue to the Taoiseach in the Dáil but that he had decided against mentioning it to the then Minister, Deputy Martin, because he was of the opinion that the Minister’s advisers and Department officials would do so.
Deputy Gormley: If Mr. Travers did ask the question and discovered that they did not meet regularly, would he agree this to be problematic?
Mr. Travers: That is outside my terms of reference and should be discussed instead with the Ministers concerned.
Deputy Gormley: My clear impression is that they were not very communicative on this serious issue. The least we ought know is the frequency of meetings between these people on important issues in their Department. Would Mr. Travers agree that this is an area that ought be probed? We are discussing political responsibility and maladministration. It is surely a cause of concern that meetings are not held regularly. I wish Mr. Travers had asked questions on this.
Mr. Travers: I assumed that frequent meetings were held by them so I did not inquire into this issue.
Deputy Gormley: What would be Mr. Travers’s view of the adequate frequency for meetings of Ministers?
Mr. Travers: Meetings should be held every few weeks.
Deputy Gormley: Every few weeks.
Deputy McManus: If Mr. Travers had made assumptions on other areas of the Department’s operations as a corporate entity, we would not have a report. He did not make assumptions on the work practices of civil servants but on how Ministers fulfil their responsibilities. Does he not think it might have been helpful to state in his report that Ministers should read their briefing documents, that highly paid advisers should make sure that their Ministers are briefed and that when a Minister says he will brief somebody he should do so? Are these not part of what happened?
Deputy Gormley: I am not privy to the operations of the Department, in particular the way in which the Minister and the Ministers of State function. However, as a person with extensive experience in the Civil Service, would Mr. Travers expect minutes to be kept of meetings between the Minister and the Ministers of State? Did he ask for the minutes of those meetings?
Mr. Travers: In response to the Deputy’s last question, the answer is that I did not. Generally, I would not expect minutes to be taken at meetings or general discussions on policy matters between the Minister and the Ministers of State. However, if officials were present at the meetings, I would have expected minutes to have been kept.
Deputy Gormley: Are we to believe there were no official meetings?
Mr. Travers: If minutes were kept on the matters I was asked to inquire into, I would have expected them to be made available to me by virtue of the fact that I had asked for them when I submitted the terms of reference to the Secretary General of the Department in December 2004.
Deputy Gormley: So would I. That leads me to believe no formal meetings take place between Ministers and their Ministers of State. That is the only conclusion to which I can come.
Mr. Travers: I do not know the answer to that question.
Deputy Gormley: I have concluded that no formal meeting took place between the former Minister and his Ministers of State because if no minutes were kept, it was not a formal meeting.
Chairman: As far as Mr. Travers is aware, no minutes were taken. The Deputy will have an opportunity to ask that question on another occasion.
Deputy Gormley: Mr. Travers has said meetings between a Minister and his or her Ministers of State should take place every few weeks. The members of this committee need to find out how often meetings took place, because if no meetings took place, there was a serious problem in the Department.
Chairman: I am not trying to stifle the debate but to be fair to Mr. Travers, he has made the point that he looked for reports but when none was forthcoming, he presumed there were no written reports. The former Minister and his Ministers of State will answer questions when they appear before the committee.
Deputy Gormley: As a person with extensive experience in the Civil Service, can Mr. Travers understand the grievance which civil servants have expressed since publication of the report that it undermines the basis on which Departments are run? Until now the buck has always stopped with Ministers, those with political responsibility. It seems that on this occasion the Secretary General is taking the rap. Does Mr. Travers see consequences in the future for the legislation which underpins the running of Departments and which dates back to the 1927? In this instance, ministerial responsibility clearly seems to count for nothing.
Mr. Travers: Having read the Department’s files and talked to officials and Ministers in recent months, my main conclusion is that this is a significant issue in terms of its legal, financial and political implications. Given the substance of the issues involved, I would have expected a good analysis of the issues would have been done and set out clearly in a memorandum prepared within the Department and made available to Ministers so that there could be no excuse and no lack of clarity as to the importance or the substance of any of the issues. I did not see any document of that nature and I was surprised by that. I had to draw the conclusion that there had been a significant failure on the part of the administrative system because if that type of analysis had been undertaken and put clearly and forthrightly under the noses of Ministers, no Minister could have ducked the issues. I did not see anything like that put forward. The Deputy asked a question and I have tried to answer it as fairly as possible. That is the conclusion I came to in respect of the documentation I saw.
The other question the Deputy asked is whether that might have a bearing on the relationship between civil servants and Ministers in the future. To the extent that civil servants have been discouraged from putting their views on substantive issues in writing, it might be a good thing if that issue were dealt with because when substantive issues such as this arise there is a need for civil servants not to duck the issue and to put it down very clearly and forthrightly on a piece of paper and provide it to the Minister concerned.