Noel Harrington (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his answers in respect of those programmes that easily lend themselves to the new guidelines. It would be helpful to the committee if the Minister and the Department could in respect of the information technology subhead which deals with MANs 1, for example, look at the figures retrospectively and apply the guidelines in a retrospective way over a number of years. That would be a useful exercise in that the Department would then be able to say that the figures as presented give more than just a snapshot but illustrate a trend over a period of time in terms of how the Department is performing with respect to its oversight of individual programmes and expenditure on those programmes. If we had information on trends over a two or three year period, that would be very useful.