Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Because it is something that concerns me will the Commissioner confirm in writing to us that between June 2015 and the date on which Mr. Kelly found out about it there was no correspondence, emails or documentation in the organisation which stated the report should not be brought to light, sent on or distributed or that people should not be made aware of it? Will the Commissioner verify in writing to the committee that there is no such correspondence, emails or documents? There are a number of requests for documents and information. There is a huge volume as a result of this meeting and our hard working staff have kept a note of them. The Commissioner has obviously kept a note of them also and we may be corresponding with her to make sure there is a correlation.

In summary, this has been an extraordinary sitting and I thank the witnesses for their time. I do not think I will ever attend a meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts as extraordinary and incredible as this one. Much of the evidence given was contradictory. I do not think there is a unified theme, but that is just my observation. There are massive issues. There are also cultural issues in the organisation which say an awful lot about it. I do not have confidence that the issues are being dealt with properly. I do not have confidence that the issues have been dealt with appropriately in the past two years because of the trawl for information, the way information is being handled and the fact that people who try to have information brought to the very top of the organisation and made public are being thwarted on many levels. We saw it happen in 2006, 2008, 2010 and, it could be argued, up to 2015. As a committee, it is something on which we will have to reflect and I am sure we will have more questions.

We have a date for the consideration of Vote 20 - 13 July - but I understand Mr. Kelly will not have concluded his work. With the agreement of the committee members present, we can use part of the time to get an update on these issues because we will have received a lot of correspondence in the preceding weeks. Is that agreed?