David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I echo those points. I have raised the issue of the independence of many of these reports several times from a process perspective. I am deeply uncomfortable with it. It chimes with an item of correspondence that deals with expenditure on consultants and legal firms by third level institutions. We will talk about that, but the points are the same. We have to stop and reflect on all of that and possibly have a stand-alone meeting on it at some point. It irritates me that we come in here to do a job and - taking this case as an example - we have 400 pages of correspondence which we, with our limited staff, have to go through. We have had the HSE, An Garda Síochána, the Department of Education and Skills and different universities in here. We have seen wrongdoing. We have had all sorts of reports, most of which have been external, so-called independent reports. Nobody is ever held to account. I am not aware of any individual in any of those organisations who has been held to account by any of them. A good example is the HSE. It commissioned a report, set the terms of reference and paid the authors. If we look at the education example, the same organisations act as internal auditors and consultants and also produce the final reports. They are the same people, and there is a lot of money involved. I do not know whether they could be genuinely seen as independent if they are the same people doing the same jobs. At the beginning they are the auditors, then they carry out the independent reports. I cannot see how they can be considered independent.

We asked for all this correspondence, and I do not know whether the Comptroller and Auditor General's office does the same when it carries out special reports. I am asking for guidance in terms of whether it is fair procedure. An independent report is carried out and a draft report is carried out. It is then sent back to the organisation for comment. How much of the report is influenced by the organisation which pays for the report to be done? Can that genuinely be seen as independent? I have a problem with that process. We saw it with the report that was carried out on the education and training boards, ETBs, as well, where there were question marks around the author of the report contacting some witnesses coming before the Committee of Public Accounts. There are many question marks, for me, around the independence of independent reports that are looking into wrongdoing, systems failures or process failures. At the end of it all we are left with a stack of so-called independent reports and nobody is held to account. There is a need for us to stop and reflect on that and carry out an analysis of it.