A proposal by the health minister, Mark Butler, for a new grant category for “explicit decisions of government” has alarmed legal and transparency experts, who warn it could lower the bar for grants at “high risk” of corruption and pork-barrelling.
The public law expert Prof Anne Twomey said the plan “appears to be an attempt to extend the perfunctory assessment of election promise grants to other publicly announced grants between election cycles that have not gone through appropriate merit assessment”. She warned against such a “retrograde step”.
