Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I support Deputy McDonald and will ask the Comptroller and Auditor General for a brief comment. Essentially, the issue boils down to this - many of the organisations that receive funding through section 38 and section 39 arrangements have other funding in their own right. All the funding seems to go into the one pot and it is then impossible to distinguish whether public funds went where they should not go or whether people will say it was private funding which went somewhere that is none of our business. That is a conundrum that we cannot live with forever. I do not want to be unnecessarily bureaucratic and have a separate set of accounts for public funds, although we might have to do so. Would Mr. McCarthy have an observation to make concerning that basic conundrum, which is that we lose accountability when funding, including private income, goes into a big pot? We are then told, in some cases, that we cannot even look at it.