Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We will. We will carry on. I cannot force the witnesses to give a particular answer but we will ask the questions and we will take it from there. All of this and the investigation arose because of the issues highlighted by the C&AG during the conduct of his 2015 accounts. That was in the context of him providing accounts to ultimately report to us. This issue has come to light because of the audit process. We are conscious of that.

Items Nos. 896A, 897A and 900A are briefing documents from Kilkenny and Carlow ETB, City of Dublin ETB and Kildare and Wicklow ETB. I want to clear up one thing about this. We made it clear the last day that City of Dublin ETB does the processing for the SUSI grant. It is a totally stand-alone, separate exercise and not the business of today. If we want to look at SUSI, it is a separate issue. They have their own job to do. It is a side issue. The SUSI situation comes into the financial statements. We are not here to deal with SUSI. We are here to deal with the core activities.

Item No. 903A is a briefing document from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform which is a copy of the code of practice for the governance of State bodies which I referred to a moment ago.

Items Nos. 904A, 905A, 906A, 907A, 909A and 911A are the opening statements from the ETBs before us today and also from the Department of Education and Skills and SOLAS. We note and publish them.

Category B is correspondence from Accounting Officers and other items for publishing. There are two items of correspondence from Martin Shanahan. I am going to make a suggestion. We have a very long day with all of these. We might hold over some of this correspondence because we could spend an hour and a half on correspondence if people wished. I am happy to give it time but we have a long day so if something can be held over in the line of correspondence until next week, we could perhaps do that. It is only a suggestion. That was from Martin Shanahan in response to the earlier correspondence to him. It was item No. 881B and 882B.