Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The work programme is on our agenda. It will come up in a few minutes. The next item is No. 955 from Mr. Graham Doyle, Secretary General of the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. It is a follow-up to the meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts on 12 October on the Transport Infrastructure Ireland financial statements. It gives information and a breakdown of various allocations of funding.

The next item is No. 960 from Mr. Mark Griffin, Secretary General of the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment, following up with additional information arising from the Committee of Public Accounts meeting of 9 November. It includes information on the remediation costs of landfill sites, the results of energy efficiency changes in the Department, conservation programme for restocking of rivers and analysis of the funding to RTÉ as well as a note on the Department.

The next item is No. 961 from Mr. Derek Moran, Secretary General of the Department of Finance, regarding the delay in laying NAMA 's individual group company accounts. I want to call that up on screen. A week or two ago we noted the publication of accounts of a large number of individual companies within the NAMA group going back over a five-year period. All had been audited on time and sent to the CRO. All had been sent to the Department but they were not sent to the Committee of Public Accounts as was required. It was probably an administrative oversight. It is unusual that people overlooked the laying of these accounts before the Oireachtas. The letter explains that and apologises for the administrative oversight. Every year we have reviewed the NAMA group accounts, which included these individual subsidiaries, but there is information in those subsidiaries' accounts that would not have been in the consolidated accounts. We will note and publish that.

The next item is No. 962 from Mr. Niall Gibbons, CEO of Tourism Ireland, replying to the committee's request for information on funding and outputs in comparison with Northern Ireland. We will note and publish it.

The next item is No. 963 from Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú, Secretary General of the Department of Education and Skills, providing additional information that was sought by the committee on 16 November on the education and training boards. We decided last week that if we had not received a comprehensive response by Tuesday, the Secretary General would be here in person to explain why we had not received a response. We received this response from him on Tuesday, and it runs to several hundred pages in a full lever arch file. The secretariat is putting it in electronic form to be uploaded to our correspondence file. We have it in electronic form. The first question we asked that day was the total funding to the education and training board sector. The Department has given a detailed analysis in the first page, stating that it comes to €1.781 billion, which is broadly the figure arrived at after the discussion. We will have to consider the full document in due course. I acknowledge it has been received and the volume is so big that we cannot get into it today. It has been circulated.

The next item is No. 965 from Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú, Secretary General of the Department of Education and Skills, providing details on the progress made to complete the contributions being made by religious orders under the 2002 and 2009 agreements. It is an ongoing process and we ask the Department to keep the committee up to date on the matter on an ongoing basis. Deputy Connolly had a number of questions on the last day and hopefully the update will be of some assistance. We will continue to-----