Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 15 February 2018

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of Seán FlemingSeán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have not seen it. It is being considered and we will have it back next week.

The next item of correspondence is No. 1065C. It is dated 5 February 2018, was received from an individual and relates to a data breach at KBC Bank. It is not within the remit of the committee to look at it. I propose, therefore, that, in order to be helpful, we provide the individual with details of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Is that agreed? Agreed. We will note the correspondence.

The next item of correspondence is No. 1069C which is dated 7 February 2018 and was received from Mr. Paul Quinn, chief procurement officer in the Office of Government Procurement. He is responding to a statement made by UCD on the ability of his office to support the needs of the university. He is clearly not in agreement with UCD on the matter. Rather than get into it now, we will allow the correspondence to come up during our engagement with the Office of Government Procurement. The meeting is included in our work programme and we will discuss the matter with the office on that occasion. We should also publish the correspondence in the meantime in order that UCD can at least see the response to its criticism of the Office of Government Procurement. We will allow both items of correspondence to be included in the public record and people can judge them accordingly because there is a disagreement.

The next item of correspondence is No. 1070C which is dated 7 February 2018 and was received from Ms Elizabeth Mullan, solicitor to the Charleton tribunal, acknowledging the receipt of transcripts from the Committee of Public Accounts forwarded by the secretariat. The correspondence will be noted.

For the benefit of those who wonder what the Committee of Public Accounts does, we have done a lot of important work in the past year or so. I want to touch on an item of correspondence which is directly related to that point in order to demonstrate how important the work we have done is. It is from the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, GSOC, in respect of its inquiry into matters in the Garda College in Templemore. The commission is seeking our assistance and the documentation and correspondence with which we have dealt. It is an issue which was highlighted here and is now the subject of a GSOC inquiry. Prior to today we also received correspondence from the disclosures tribunal under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Charleton. We were also happy to deal with that request and supply everything which had been sought. Matters discussed here are now the subject matter of the Charleton tribunal.

We also received correspondence from the commission of investigation under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Cooke which was dealing with NAMA and Project Eagle. We have been assisting and supporting that inquiry in dealing with all of its requests for information. It is another item with which we have dealt extensively.

We have also dealt extensively with the commission of inquiry into the Grace case and related cases under the chairmanship of Ms Marjorie Farrelly, SC. We are assisting the commission by providing information. I realise this is a new departure and I have been in the House a few years. So much of what has come to us has fed into these four separate tribunals or commissions of investigation. It shows that we are dealing with very important issues of public interest.

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