Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the officials and thank them for their preparation for this session. Given the number of files in front of Ms Dowling, I am led to think there will not be a question I can ask for which she will not have a comprehensive answer.

I have questions on public private partnerships, primary schools, the status of the Grangegorman project, school transport and school patronage. However, I would like to pick up on SUSI first. I spent a morning in the organisation's offices with the staff on Mespil Road and witnessed their work. I received many representations about the system as well. Once they recognised the scale of the difficulty, a quality effort went in to overcoming it. I acknowledge that people such as Mr. John Conroy recognise the scale of the challenge and they are committed to overcoming it.

However, even in recent years, a number of efforts have been made to centralise the processing of applications for State schemes and each time the same difficulty has been encountered. Medical card applications were centralised in offices in a number of locations throughout the State, including one near me in Ballymun, and there were huge delays in dealing with applications for quite a period until the system bedded down. The same happened with carer's allowance applications in the aftermath of the medical cards issue and then this happened. While I accept Mr. Ó Foghlú's point that, within the educational sphere, this represents a big effort to centralise things, things happened to which we have to respond. Within the government sphere, this keeps on happening. Was an analysis conducted of what happened when medical card applications were centralised? Did people ask what could be learned from that? Was this perspective taken across government or was the SUSI process examined in isolation without considering what had happened elsewhere over the previous 18 months?