Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that. Other issues include medium-term objectives and the stability programme update. These are all issues that this committee needs to have time to discuss with the Minister, so I appreciate that and I thank the Minister.

The EU referendum in Great Britain is on the horizon. In respect of subheads A6 and A8 and the Special EU Programmes Body, SEUPB, which is within the Minister's Department, we have given a lot of resources and time to ensuring that this North-South body is adequately funded and that the PEACE programme is funded adequately from an EU perspective. Has the Minister a view on the effect on those programmes if the UK exits the EU? Subhead A8 concerns the Ireland Wales Territorial Co-operation Programme. I am very worried that if the UK exits the EU it will have a profound effect on programmes operating on a North-South basis from both a social and an economic point of view. I would welcome the Minister's perspective on that.

In respect of procurement, I note that reference was made to savings of €80 million to €100 million and previous savings. I have a worry about Irish SMEs. I note that there has been a lot of work done with regard to the local enterprise offices and "meet the buyer" events and so on, and savings have been made. Has the Department calculated whether more Irish SMEs have taken up this opportunity and whether pre-existing Irish companies and SMEs have been crowded out by virtue of the fact that they lack the economies of scale required to compete for business? I make specific reference to the education sector, where there is anecdotal evidence that companies that supplied arts and crafts supplies, books and other products in the education sphere feel they will not be able to retain the market share they had and are being crowded out by the new regime for procuring savings. I do not necessarily need an answer to that today. I am just putting down a marker, and we might have a further discussion on it because there are companies that are feeling a bit of pressure in that space.

Is PeoplePoint operating at full capacity? Have the individual line Departments' HR and payment functions migrated to PeoplePoint in a seamless fashion? We all acknowledge that there will be a lag on that and that there will be issues that must be dealt with, but I would like to hear the Minister's perspective on whether PeoplePoint is up and running and whether it is responding to individual workers' queries in a timely fashion.

In respect of Vote 19, provision is made for issues such as prisoner complaints, clinical judgements and direct provision to be dealt with by the Office of the Ombudsman. I understand it has a budget of €9.7 million. Will the Office of the Ombudsman have an expanded role? Is the cost of this being met in respect of the potential need for increased personnel to deal with an expanded service?

I have a bugbear concerning our own services here. Our own IT infrastructure has not migrated to the cloud. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is doing a very good job of ensuring that build-to-share and cloud service platforms are built through the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer. I note the statement relating to data mining and so on. Is this is a matter for further discussion somewhere down the line? We could discuss how the Oireachtas operates in respect of our own ICT infrastructure and making loose systems available, because the systems we are operating at the moment are a bit anachronistic and arcane and might need to be looked at. That is a very minor issue, but I said I would take the opportunity to raise it with the Minister while he was here.

I welcome the comments on the opening up of a dialogue with the public sector unions on the commission. The Minister made a very clear statement about how any sudden elimination of the FEMPI measures is not feasible. I was hoping for more time today to discuss the summer economic statement, the fiscal space and the new moneys that appear to have been made available, because I wonder whether there is scope to accelerate the unwinding of FEMPI, given the increased resources that would appear to be available as an outcome of the summer economic statement.