David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want clarification before this session about what we can or cannot deal with. Local authorities are not audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General's office. There is separate auditing. The principal funder is the Department and then there is the local government fund. We are dealing with the accounts for the then Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government. Within that are water, property tax and a range of other issues. I do not want to go to do a lot of research and work from my office, have many questions to ask and then to be told that the Department cannot answer those questions and that it is a matter for local authorities. That happened with RTÉ, which I will raise again in a few minutes. We had that with JobPath when the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection was in, and it was a big chunk of their budget. It said that it could not answer those questions, that it signed a cheque, that there was a service-level agreement and that we should go off to look at that. What are the parameters of this?

As part of the briefing note that was requested, I want information on how public housing is funded. Where does the money come from? We have the Housing Agency and other entities. There are questions relating to whether that will go on the balance sheet. That is a big issue. There are other strands in the areas of planning and community, such as grant aid. I imagine we will be told that that is grant aid and how that money is spent is a matter for the organisations to which the money is given. I do not want those to be stonewalled and for us to be told that those questions cannot be answered because it is not a matter for Accounting Officers in those Departments and that it is for other entities for which separate auditing is done. I am pre-empting that possibility. Can we get some sense of what we can or cannot ask and what we can or cannot deal with? We will make our own minds up as to whether we can ask them. The Chairman gets my point. We do not want to waste our time.