Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I join Deputy Broughan in thanking the staff for preparing all the various documents and I wish them well. With regard to the parliamentary budget office, there is an item in the briefing document indicating that a discussion paper will be prepared once preliminary decisions have been taken on many issues and the position of the Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform have become clear. That is probably the most important line in it. They are not known to be sharing and caring types. This "new politics" is the biggest challenge to permanent Government, as well as elected representatives, so what will be their attitude to a parliamentary budget office and the subsequent work of this committee and its successor committee? That should be pursued with the Secretaries General of both Departments very early on. There is no point in us setting up a structure and having a collective ambition for the work of the successor to this committee if the permanent Government behind it and which is supposed to serve this committee has a problem with it. We need to find that out at a very early stage in our work.

Deputies Doherty and Boyd Barrett made suggestions that I support. I also wish to follow up the commitment in the programme for Government that policies would be "region proofed". Every expenditure and revenue raising issue should be considered with this in mind as well. We need to fit in a structure from this committee on how that could be done. As the other sectoral committees will be established during the lifetime of the work of this committee, we must send correspondence to every sectoral committee to get, at an early stage, their input as to what they see our work as and how they will see the work of the successor committee. That should mean that from the start, we will understand their role and they will understand our role. It will make all our lives much easier down the road.