John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Mr. McCarthy, you suggest it is systemic issue. That is a system failure but behind a system failure, is there not a person, an individual or a manager? Therefore, it is not a system failure but a failure of management. I refer to when one has a manager who understands the procurement process - and Mr. Watt constantly explains to the committee through his Department how significant it is and how much in savings can be made from the new procurement processes - yet it oversees an agency such as the HSE that is squandering money and is ignoring procurement processes and nobody appears to take action to stop it. In this collection of accounts before the committee this morning, because there are so many of them, members can see poor value for taxpayers' money, systems being abandoned and procurement by and large being abandoned. They can see a huge amount of money being wasted in the education sector. They see agencies that now are providing the committee with accounts over a four-year period. Another agency that is providing accounts over a four-year period is, I believe, the one responsible for the development of a technical university in Dublin. How competent are they or what is going wrong that those who are in charge are not doing their jobs to ensure there is value for money and the systems that are in place work? The question for the Committee of Public Accounts and for Mr. McCarthy's own office is, having highlighted these issues, how far we can go to ensure proper governance of the State's expenditure is put in place and is properly policed. Incidentally, it should be stated that in all those cases, no one will lose his or her job. No sanction will be taken against any individual who has breached any of this stuff and we never hear of a case in which it was Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so who bypassed the regulations, did not do it properly and who has been sanctioned. They would be, were this in the private sector, but the only sanction I have ever seen here is one gets promoted when something happens or one is sidelined into the grey area but no sanction is taken against one. Until that happens, nothing else will change.