Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is a farce if funds that are identified to help materially individuals struggling with regard to income, job prospects and enterprise development have a bureaucratic line drawn around them to prevent them being spent. It is shocking. People outside the political world ask me and, I am sure, other elected representatives every day how the State can be so impractical in its delivery of services. A senior Minister has said there is much capture, as it is called, going on. A Minister would go into a particular role with very strong views of what should happen and high hopes.

All of a sudden, however, the Minister is surrounded by ten or 15 experts, possibly with PhDs, who can think of 100 reasons for not taking the most logical steps, and this leads to a freezing of action in Departments. We are near to the completion of a report which hopes to identify a large number of recommendations and actions which will be given to the new Minister, hopefully to implement. The evidence given by the witnesses will inform a large part of our thinking and the content of that report.