Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The debate we had was not about the total amount of information that the Department gives to Europe or the amount of information that it gives in public documentation. It is the process of accountability to this Oireachtas for the money that is given by the Oireachtas to Ministers to spend. It is unreasonable for the Department to expect Deputies and Senators to get all of this information from all the various documents and create a parallel set of indicators. From what the Minister has said, the Department has much more definitive indicators in all sorts of other accountancy systems, but it shares them with the Oireachtas in a direct manner. In other words, they are not written in the Book of Estimates. Let us look at the information we got this week. All of the subheads used to be published in the Revised Estimates, but this week, for example, we got a breakdown of REPS, the agri-environment options scheme, AEOS, GLAS, etc. under a heading of "Agri-environment schemes." We are in the last day of the ninth month, but we got a breakdown that used to be published in the Revised Estimates.