Mr. Robert Watt:

I am perfectly happy to engage in this discussion and to take the recommendations and to learn the lessons from the work of the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General. That is the whole point of having the system set up in the way it is. However, I simply do not agree with the idea, for example, in this case, that there is material non-compliance with procurement. If that is the case, it has not been demonstrated in the report that I have read, because what I have read shows that, excluding the An Post contract, there is €80 million out of an overall amount. While the Comptroller and Auditor General might state his office did not look at the entire €9 billion and that it is less than that, based on what I have seen, it cannot be established that there is material non-compliance in procurement.

I will be perfectly blunt with the Chairman about my worry in this regard. The coverage of these issues and of the report published this week outlined a litany of waste and of abuse and a system that is malfunctioning and dysfunctional, which I do not think is a fair reading of the report. I am not criticising, because neither the committee nor the Comptroller and Auditor General are responsible for the media coverage, but people must develop a sense of balance and perspective. While absolutely every single issue of waste must be identified and we must act on such an issue, it must be put in the context of the overall spend that is under review and the size of that overall spend. This is the point I am making because people have a sense of confidence, or a lack thereof, in the system based on how a report is reported and, in my view, that is not fair. It is not what the Comptroller and Auditor General is saying and it gives a distorted view of the performance of the system. Let us have a report alongside this report that talks about all the successes, all the achievements all the improvements, all the productivity grains and all the examples of where money is properly spent. Why do we not do that as well?