Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 8 March 2018

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of David CullinaneDavid Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

------achieve efficiencies and to streamline communications within different Departments and the work of the public service and the Civil Service.

The difficulty is and the concern, if I can call it that, that many of us have is that the unit became something else and is being used for party political purposes. The Committee of Public Accounts has an absolute obligation to see if that was the case because all political parties are funded by the taxpayer and are given funding to use for purposes such as advertising and so on. They can spend money in many different ways but they must account for same. If a party in government used taxpayers' money in any way outside of that remit and thus had an advantage over other political parties then it would be undemocratic, wrong and, potentially, an abuse of taxpayers' money and needs to be probed.

Serious questions have been raised about the advertisement of the national planning framework and the national capital plan and how the advertisements in regional and local newspapers were done. We must, therefore, ask some obvious questions. Who authorised all of that work? Who supervised such activities? Who is accountable? Is the process working in terms of the rationale behind setting up the unit in the first place? Was the money spent for those purposes? Was the money spent for other purposes? Are we getting value for money? Are we getting efficiencies? Are we seeing changes? These are genuine questions on all of these issues. We can park the political charges because we will all make them when we leave the Committee of Public Accounts.

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