Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and the Minister of State. I am pleased that the Minister has acknowledged that some aspects of the report are not specific enough. There are issues even with the language, such as in the reference to commitments to optimise the finalisation of Employment Appeals Tribunal legacy cases and to continue to improve the workplace relations structure. Numbers can be put on that kind of thing. How many legacy cases do we have? What is involved in the whole optimisation area?

There is also a worry with regard to legislation. While we welcome everything that has happened, there are concerns about the speed at which it is happening. Even though two years have passed since we identified problems with the credit guarantee scheme legislation, which was mentioned by the Minister, the relevant legislation will be debated on Second Stage in the House at some point in this term. I understand the difficulty might not be within the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation - it may be within the Office of the Attorney General - but we need to be able to measure that. This committee needs to be able to put pressure on the Office of the Attorney General because the changes that the Minister will propose in the legislation in question will have an impact on businesses and on employment.

The Minister referred to serving two masters, which is always a dangerous thing. Has the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform expressed any concern to the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at any stage about the quality of the Department's reporting? If so, what has the Department's reaction been?

I know we will get into the meat of today's business in the next part of this meeting. While this process is beneficial, it is also frustrating because it is to be expected that two weeks out from the budget, the Minister is more or less finalising his Estimate for 2016. Can he give us an indication of that Estimate and of the planning going into it? Can he give us details of his engagement with his second master - the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform - with regard to expenditure plans? Can he tell us about the new expenditure programmes on which he is trying to focus? In addition to trying to review the Department's performance over the past year, we would like to influence its performance over the next 12 months.