Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Department is supposed to obtain the agreement of this committee, but if the committee does not have the necessary skills or the time to do so, it is a meaningless rubber-stamping job. In the years I have been a member of the committee we have simply rubber-stamped the spending of huge amounts of money, the expenditure of which was not really assessed by the committee. I am not saying it would have been any different if we had received the information a few days earlier, but a huge amount of money is involved.