Michael Colreavy (Sligo-North Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister and welcome his officials. One thing I find frustrating since becoming a Member of the House is the difficulty in measuring personal and occupational progress against targets. It is difficult to assess whether I as a Deputy and committee member am performing well or badly and it is difficult to know what measurement criteria I should be using to make that evaluation. It must also be difficult for a Department to state the criteria and targets against which it measures its performance and for it to examine how close or far it is from meeting those.

Typically, there are both qualitative and quantitative criteria. I have noticed that in terms of looking at budgets and expenditure to date, we are good at counting what is easy to count. However, that tells us very little about how good the public service being provided by the Department is, what plans are in place to improve services and how well or badly we are doing in achieving those. I am not being critical because I understand it is not an easy process. In a previous existence, I was haunted by performance indicator measurement and monitoring. Frankly, I found it a pain in the neck when we started using the measurement system, but as we became accustomed to using performance measurements, they became second nature to us and it was good for me to measure whether I was meeting the outputs set for the projects I was working on.

The key issue is whether we can come up with a measurement system, and we have the New Zealand model. This may need to be tweaked for the Irish context, but there is no question that we need such a system. I knew but had forgotten that a recent OECD report stated this State's Parliament is 54th out of 60 in a study of parliaments in terms of scrutiny of departmental budgets. We can all hide behind imprecision and it can be quite fun to have philosophical discussion as to what is happening in a Department. However, as committee members we are not delivering a good public service unless we can measure whether Departments are delivering on the promises they made.

I am glad to hear from the Minister that his Department has accepted that some sort of monitoring is required. It may well be that further work needs to be done on establishing the criteria for that. The committee should have some input into the process of deciding what performance measurement will be used. We also need to consider how we can establish the qualitative rather than quantitative performance of the Department. Again, I would like the committee to be involved in that process.