Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

At the start of the meeting we will be putting the Secretary General of the Department of Education and Skills in the hot seat for sanctioning estimates and expenditure year in year out when he has not seen the previous year's audited accounts.

The second point: there were only a couple of us here at the end of the last meeting with the Health Service Executive, HSE, and it was one of the most positive conclusions I have seen to a PAC meeting, as a result of all the pressure PAC has put on the HSE in respect of payments under sections 38 and 39. Mr. O'Brien said that in respect of every organisation, and there are hundreds of them, that get a grant from the HSE in excess of €150,000, it is in receipt of 100% of the 2015 accounts, completed. It is well over 70% of the way through the 2016 accounts and we are not near the end of the year. He did not threaten to cut their funding but to delay it until such time as they got their accounts in. That resulted in 100% compliance by the sections 38 and 39 organisations. That has not happened in any other section. There is a great lesson to be learned from how the HSE did it, without any statutory authority, just a straight business approach, if they delayed sending in accounts it would delay sending out next year's cheques. It brought them all to heel. That is remarkable. I asked him if he could second some of the staff who achieved that to another Department. We had a good laugh at the end of it. I am not saying we should go that far but the HSE is one third of the public service. It has achieved this as a result of the pressure from what goes on here. We can actually achieve something. The first step is to get the audited accounts in. We do our job and we put the pressure on others to do their job.

The work programme for today is to meet the Department of Communications, Climate Action and the Environment. Next week we will meet the Department of Education and Skills, Solas, City of Dublin Education and Training Board, ETB, Kilkenny and Carlow ETB, Kildare and Wicklow ETB and Tipperary ETB. That is four ETBs. We will break it into three sessions, first, the Department of Education and Skills and Solas; the second group will be City of Dublin and Kilkenny and Carlow ETBs; and the third will be Kildare, Wicklow and Tipperary ETBs. We have said that all people from all organisations are to be present for the duration of all the meetings. We want the people from City of Dublin ETB to hear what Solas says and people from Tipperary to hear what is said about Kildare and Wicklow because we want them to hear what is going on. Some may have particular issues, others not. If they do not all fit in the Public Gallery some of them will be asked to sit for the duration of the day's proceedings. Next week's meeting will be long, with three separate sessions of two hours apiece. There might be a voting bloc between them.