Shane Ross will not use ‘State chequebook’ in Luas row

Minister for Transport Shane Ross said he would not be intervening in the Luas dispute nor using the “State chequebook” to settle the dispute.

Mr Ross was speaking to Marian Finucane on RTE Radio after his first week as a Minister. On Friday strike action over pay and conditions again halted Luas services and affected some 90,000 people in Dublin.

Mr Ross said the procedure of Cabinet was very formal. “It is somewhat intimidating” involving “a huge table in this very grand room and it is chaired by the Taoiseach obviously.”

Mr Ross said “there is a great confidence amongst those who have been there a certain amount of time and the rest of us are just kind of goggle-eyed looking at each other saying am I allowed talk. But we are not shrinking violets”.

He said some of the civil servants “to my surprise have a very good sense of humour, which is very refreshing” but he was determined not to lose his radicalism.

“ I can see already how you can be captured. I can see already the pressures. I can see the pressures from other politicians who are very conformist. I can see the pressures from civil servants and politicians that they are kind of powerful people with maybe common agendas, you have got to pull yourself away from it from time to time”.

Mr Ross said he hated “being called Minister, and would be instructing his staff not to do so.

He also said he was determined to be careful about “doing any press” until he had read himself into the brief .He acknowledged he had got “into trouble” as a senior civil servant complained over his announcement of his appointment, before the Taoiseach had told the Dáil.

Mr Ross salso spoke about negotiations on the formation of the Government, saying

Mr Ross said when talks became difficult the parties would send for Minister for Finance Michael Noonan, who would act “a kind of elder statesman, when things got really sticky”.

Mr Noonan “has great authority” he said. “ They kind of nod when he comes in and when he says something it goes, all senior ministers seem to accept that.... I trusted him”.

In fact Mr Ross said Mr Noonan “was so good at negotiating that from time to time you felt he was on our side”.

“You had to be careful to make sure you didn’t feel that way ”, he said.

On the programme for Government which was eventually negotiated Mr Ross said key issues were the scrapping of the Judicial Appointments Advisory board (Jaabs) “which we call Jaabs for the Boys”; facilities for Waterford Hospital which were a key priority for Independent TD Michael Halligan; a review of the closure of 139 garda stations, particularly Stepaside in south Dublin which is in his own Dáil Constituency and a re-examination of the potential to reopen the western rail corridor north of Athenry.

While these were sectional interests he said they were part of the “bigger picture”.

“There is going to be an utterly dramatic reform in judicial appointments” he said. “Judges are going to be appointed in a completely different way in the future” he said. “The Judicial Appointments Advisory Board is going to be abolished because that was all full of insiders”.

He said future nominees would selected by a public appointments service body which would hold interviews and give the minister of the day a choice of three. He said the public appointments service “will be an independent body of interviewers, they never had interviewers before”.

He congratulated Siptu chief Jack O’Connor on an Irish Times podcast in which Mr O’Connor had said “Shane Ross and I only agree on world being round”. Mr Ross said he would extend “an olive branch” to Mr O’Connor through his Sunday newspaper column.