Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

I will be fully accountable to Dáil Éireann under the Constitution as soon as the legislation is enacted. Its Members can ask retrospectively about anything I have done from the moment I was appointed. They will not be time-barred from doing that. Therefore, I will be fully accountable. I am happy to be accountable already. It certainly took longer than I expected on the day I was appointed to have this enactment but, as I explained this morning, this is the first time that there has been a fundamental restructuring of the Department of Finance. It required the trawling of every statutory instrument back to 1924, which was a Herculean task. If I may again probably stray into unacceptable territory, I pay tribute to the people in my office and my Department who did that Herculean task in such quick time to provide to disaggregate functions that not only go back to the foundation of the State, but because many of the powers of the UK Administration were absorbed into the Department of Finance, go back to Victorian times. We discovered functions of the Minister for Finance that he did not know he had in the trawl that was presented and we have abolished some of them in amendments in the other House.

We now have robust legislation to do the twin jobs the Minister for Finance and I are required to do. One is on the macroeconomic side to ensure that the ship of State is guided well from a macroeconomic perspective, that there is proper interaction with the Troika and that the Minister for Finance's focus is on those matters. The other job is to ensure that I am free to do the reform agenda - which, bluntly, would not be done by a Minister for Finance because it could not be done by a single Minister for Finance - and at the same time have control of the resources to ensure that reform is not resisted.

I appreciate what the Deputy is saying but he will find that my accountability will be full and complete both to this House and the other House.