Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Secretary General said to the Chairman, when we were finishing up on the last occasion, that the local government fund subvention was €439 million last year, €399 million this year and €479 million in 2016. The Secretary General was unable to go beyond that point and said there would be a new plan in place. As he knows well, his Department and every Department published their expenditure ceilings for 2015 to 2017 on budget day, 15 October. Expenditure ceilings were announced in that document for every Department, including the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. It is not possible that the expenditure ceiling figure for 2017 was put into the document without some work having been done in each of the Departments to make up the figure. It is clear there is an estimate in the Department and it has been published as the 2017 figure. The Secretary General felt we did not have an estimate and said we have figures up to 2017. Those figures for 2017 must exist because if they were not then the process was a work of fiction. I am not saying that it was.

The Secretary General gave the impression he had a plan in place. That led the Chairman to respond by saying no organisation could go anywhere with a plan that lasts until the end of next year when one is talking about hundreds of millions of euro. It struck me during that conversation that the Department has a plan in place for beyond that point but the Secretary General did not allude to it. To help us at this stage even though it is a bit late, please tell us what figure he has pencilled in

- I know it can change - for the subvention to Irish Water in 2017. It is in the expenditure ceilings and was published by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform on budget day in the middle of last October.