Mr. Jim Breslin:

Our project plan for creating the new agency is updated every week. Some key milestones in it which will determine the eventual decision include not just when the legislation comes into the Oireachtas but when it is passed by the Oireachtas. That will be crucial. We are approaching the summer period so there is a question around that. The Minister has highlighted many of the areas, including the early initiative to move towards a governance arrangement by putting the people who will populate the board in place and notifying staff in advance that they are going to move and not waiting for the legislation to be passed. We have pre-empted many of the critical steps that would need to be taken after the legislation is passed and tried to put all of them in place as soon as possible.

We do not have all of the steps in place and one of the things I must do, as the Minister takes the legislation through the Houses, is see the extent to which they are co-ordinated and calibrated. If the legislation was passed really quickly, would we be able to take advantage of that and what would be the lead-in to do that? None of us envisages the legislation being concluded on a Friday and the agency being created on the Monday, although there have been precedents in the past that have gone close to that. They are not particularly good precedents. It is important for the board and the management of the agency to see the final legislation passed by the House and to make their final preparations with that knowledge. They should do that quickly but not with the type of haste where it is five to midnight and we all move over in the morning, with the unions around the table and so forth. In view of the work that has been done, I am confident that we are not far away from it.

The budget of the agency will make it the second largest public body in the State. It will be over €0.5 billion. I realise billions do not appear to be much any more in public finance, but it will be a huge budget. It will be somewhat dwarfed by the HSE, but the HSE is a mammoth. This will be a major body compared with all other public bodies, and we must have accountability not just on finance but, importantly, on finance in place so we can account to the Oireachtas for it.

Bodies have been created before without transparent infrastructure. We need systems in place for management to make effective use of the resource. We have a project working on same. We will bring in some external support to make some changes over the course of the summer and will try to get financial systems in place. I do not have a completion point for those changes at present because we must contract the external support. The overall project and the legislation will be critical factors in when we go live.

With regard to the business of going live, enacted legislation means one can have an Estimate passed and brought before the House. If legislation is not passed then we cannot bring an Estimate for the agency before the House. The legislation would have to go through and then, if the Oireachtas was going to give the agency a budget, it would have to bring Revised Estimates through for both the new agency and the HSE because that is where the largest part of the budget would come from. Obviously there is a question on when one does that. It has been done before mid-year for the creation of agencies. It is generally not done at the back end of the year because once one reaches the November-December budgetary cycle - although the budget is a little bit advanced this year - it means January. Without giving a specific final decision, and because no final decision has been made, the three pieces are the legislation, the final preparations and I would emphasise the financial processing pieces around that. The final requirement that would be on us and on the House to vote is the resources for the agency and the timeline for those three things.