Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Even if there are different segments, all members must be here for all of them and not just for what pertains to their own little pigeonhole. When we dealt with the education sector, we had the Department, the education and training boards, ETBs, and the HEA in the room at the one time.

The next item is the overview of public private partnerships, which will be after St. Patrick's Day, on 22 March. We propose to bring in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, because it sets the policy, the Department of Education and Skills, which is one of the biggest users of PPPs, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, the principal user, and the National Development Finance Agency. I want a letter to go from this committee to each of those organisations because I know what will happen otherwise. They will talk about commercial sensitivity so that we can discuss nothing. I do not know how far we will get but we can certainly get farther than a response such as that. I propose we write to each of them asking them to provide as much financial information as they can by way of a briefing note a fortnight in advance of the meeting. In particular, we will ask them to justify their inability to give us full commercial details of any contract more than five years old. Commercial sensitivity might be valid at a certain point in time but not for ever. This will give us the opportunity to consider the information before we have the public meeting.

We are holding over 29 March for the third level sector. There are three or four different topics but we will not come to them today. On 19 April, it will be the Department of Finance to discuss Government debt and the Exchequer outturn for the year, which is a key ingredient of our work. On 26 April, we have the Department of Justice and Equality on the development of its IT system, on which there is a special chapter in the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. We will deal with the Garda internal audit report on its IT contracts on that day too.

On 3 May, we have Vote 29 - Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment, particularly in relation to RTÉ, which is substantially funded. Deputy Cullinane is keen on this but on the day the Department was here it said it was obliged to have a service level agreement in place with RTÉ and that it received €170 million each year, the majority of its funding. The Department has failed in its duty to do its work so the Committee of Public Accounts will do the job. There is widespread agreement because the majority of its funding is from public funds and it is appropriate to bring the organisation in on that basis. We will not get into anything about its editorial content as it is not in our remit. We are going to discuss the financial aspects of the organisation.