Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It was probably remiss of me not to thank the Chairman for the amount of reports that the committee had sent me in recent months. I hope that members will see that I have read them and have taken heed, given my public utterances about my intentions regarding some of them.

I must say that I found the reports published by this committee to be very valuable, particularly those on lone parents and on pensions. I would like to thank the committee for those reports and I should have mentioned that in my speech. The first question concerned savings. There are obviously some savings in the budget for our overall spend this year. I am reliably informed, however, that although the savings are made in our Department we do not own that money. It goes back, rather, to the Department of Finance before the end of the year and it is at that level that the Department of Finance decides where that money does and does not get spent. While I will be fighting very hard-----