Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I mentioned three areas, Garda pay, the pay deal for public servants and water charges. I raised this with the Minister on budget day because I expected this would be the outcome. These issues amount to close to a quarter of billion euro. In the next budget the net fiscal space will be half a billion euro. This is not an insignificant sum. I have no doubt that this will be accommodated within the budget because it is quite large. That is neither here nor there, but the point is that I am on this committee to do a job. My job is to scrutinise the expenditure and where tax revenue is being raised. It is not a case of making a decision the following week. It is three months since this decision was made. It was done in January. I would expect that officials and the Department would have an indication that they will have to delay a capital project, withdraw a scheme or delay the starting of a scheme to try to trim the costs.

In terms of the Garda pay deal, it was very clear that €25 million extra had been allocated and €25 million had to be found from the Department. We have no indication where the €120 million from the pay deal or the €59 million forgone in water charges will be found. Will it be found from one or two or every single Department? Will it come from capital or current expenditure? We have no idea. It is really difficult, and I am speaking personally, to come to a budget scrutiny committee meeting when one does not have the information to scrutinise or when one puts questions on the position from January to date, and we do not have the information. That is not a reflection on the officials. I have listed to Mr. Watt and Mr. McCarthy provide information. I have put genuine questions on the things that I believe we have to do. God forbid, we might find out.

The history in this State is that we scrutinised it afterwards. We dealt with the expenditure of the State after it was spent. We find out six months later that the Department took so much from the mental health budget or the hospital services budget to pay for that. That would not be acceptable, and we would be asked by the public what this committee was doing when our job was to scrutinise these issues. That is the problem.