Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On a logistical point, many of us will be on other sectoral committees, so in terms of meetings of this committee and the permanent committee that will replace it, there will need to be co-ordination with the Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform in particular.

To pick up on Deputy MacSharry's point, the key question for the permanent oversight committee that will be in place in a month or so is how it will interface with the actual budget that will be announced in mid-October. The whole idea, as I understood it, was that the Parliament would have a much more mature way of examining the options, debating the challenges, looking at revenue and expenditure and that would feed into the budget process.

If, however, the outcome is that we are not really, in any meaningful way, getting away from the big bang announcement on budget day, then one would have to question what it is all about. We will go into the process in good faith and, hopefully, our work can be meaningful and can feed into that process. That is the ultimate question for me. If we are all sitting in the Chamber in the middle of October and the Minister comes in to announce a budget that we do not have a clue about, one would have to question what this is all about. We should wait and see.

On the independent parliamentary budget office, the suggestion is that it is with a view to setting it up in spring of next year. That is the guts of a year away; it is not ambitious enough. We must examine that to see how we can get that done much more quickly.