Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In truth, there is a meeting scheduled for 16 February and I would hope that we could have a first discussion on the draft report on Tuesday or Wednesday of that week. We will wait and see but that is a possibility.

In the meantime, our work schedule is as follows. On Thursday, 16 February we will be meeting the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to discuss the appropriation accounts, Vote 30 and the Comptroller and Auditor General's chapter on EU refunds and levies in the agriculture sector. On Thursday, 23 February we will be dealing with the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, while on Thursday, 2 March we will meet the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government to discuss the appropriation accounts, the Vote for environment, community and local government and the Comptroller and Auditor's chapter on central government funding of local authorities. We will also discuss Chapter 5, which deals with progress on land aggregation. We will also discuss the Ballymun renewal project, which has been the subject of correspondence with this committee.

On Thursday, 9 March we will meet the Department of Health and the HSE to deal with patients' private property accounts, the fair deal nursing home scheme as referenced in the HSE's financial statement, as well as the special account for the purposes of the Health (Repayment Scheme) Act 2006. The latter will be included that as an item on our agenda for the meeting on 9 March. There will be separate meetings with the HSE about section 38 and section 39 hospitals and so forth.

On Thursday, 23 March we will meet the Department of Education and Skills. I propose that on Thursday, 30 March and Thursday, 6 April, we deal with the third level institutions. In the first instance, we should start with some of the universities and we can go on to the institutes of technology later. I believe we should open up the session with the Higher Education Authority, HEA, which deals with all third level institutions. We will try to determine which universities we should call and in what order. I have no particular view as to which universities to invite but would point out that we cannot invite them all. The University of Limerick has been brought to this committee's attention through various correspondence. DCU was highlighted in terms of big procurement issues during the course of the year-----