Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are joined by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Mr. Seamus McCarthy, as permanent witness to the committee and he is accompanied today by Mr. Shane Carton, director of audit.

There are just a few items of correspondence since our meeting of yesterday. In category A correspondence, we have correspondence items 374, 378 and 379, the opening statements from the University of Limerick, University College Cork and Dundalk Institute of Technology, in advance of today's meeting. Is it agreed to note and publish those? Agreed.

Category B is correspondence from Accounting Officers or Ministers and follow-up to meetings. Correspondence items 384 (i) to (iii) were received from the HSE yesterday as follow-up to our engagement with the director general last week. The letter also states that there was not time to respond to the further questions sent yesterday morning. Members may not have had time to read that letter, which arrived last night. In any event, as a result of yesterday's meeting, we sent three further requests for information and the HSE stated it did not have time yesterday. Given that we are still awaiting further responses, I believe that the best course of action now is to put the HSE officials on notice that they may be required to appear before the committee the week after next. We could decide a definite position on that at our meeting next Thursday when we receive the correspondence. We have received a response to what we requested last week. Yesterday morning we asked for three further pieces of information. Understandably, that has not been received yet. The HSE has indicated it will deal with it as soon as possible. I suggest we wait until we get that. In advance of receiving that we should now put its officials on notice to expect to appear the following week.