Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are dragging this out now. We are not finished. I am not eating into Deputy Cullinane's time. He is the next speaker. Has any of the people with Mr. Ó Foghlú seen them? This is very important. The letter Mr. Ó Foghlú got from the committee inviting him to this meeting since the Committee of Public Accounts was established made it very clear that when an Accounting Officer is attending and information is requested during the course of the meeting, he or she should have somebody on hand to go back and check the Department and get something e-mailed or sent over. It should be done during the course of the meeting, because we are here for several hours, so we do not have to wait for it in the post in a week's time. We need to know. This is extraordinary. I do not understand how Mr. Ó Foghlú performed his function as an Accounting Officer for the Department of Education and Skills, when this amount of money is concerned and he has been able to respond to the Comptroller and Auditor General's report - his responses are in the report - yet when we tease him out about the meetings, he says he does not know whether there were minutes taken and that he has never seen them. How did he adequately make those responses to the Comptroller and Auditor General's report if he does not know whether or not there were minutes taken and without taking the trouble to look at them? We are talking about hundreds of millions and Mr. Ó Foghlú does not even know if minutes were taken of thee 15 meetings he has referred to? Can Mr. Ó Foghlú ask his colleagues if minutes were taken? I am asking him to ask his colleagues to give us the answer. Were minutes taken?