Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The second thing relates to the Comptroller and Auditor General. One of the issues we raised last week is the area of intellectual property and its commercialisation and the processes, procedures, oversight, conflicts of interest, the money in terms of revenues generated and who got what proportionately. We proposed a special investigation and it is still my view that we need it. We need to get under the bonnet of this. One of the difficulties we have is that the Comptroller has the discretion and authority to audit the institutions but there is the issue of all of these spin-out companies. We need to know what happens thereafter because the innovation in the first instance is incubated and financed by lots of public money. As it is such an important sector in terms of job creation, it is really important that we get on top of that. We had made a proposal. Mr. McCarthy was not here last week but we made a proposal on a special report or some similar mechanism to explore that area. I would be interested to hear what he has to say on that.

I have a third issue but I am happy to come back in on it.