Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is zero prospect of that. As Chairman, I have to point out that the Accounting Officer is obliged to come here. He is normally accompanied by several members of staff to assist him. None of those staff is obliged to come here. The only person who is obliged to come here is the Accounting Officer. I have seen some of the more junior staff members who have presented here, having been under no obligation at all to come here, being put severely and unfairly under pressure by certain members of the committee. We had to stop it on a previous occasion. There is no question about the Accounting Officer. We want full co-operation from all departmental staff. I am making the point that there is a distinction in this regard.

As Chairman, I will consider the opening note I read at the beginning of each meeting. I will discuss it with the secretariat. I will probably put in a paragraph to the effect that we expect answers to questions and candour from the witnesses who appear before the committee, and that they can be assured they will be treated with respect by members of the committee when they are here. That is the jist of it. The topic is closed.

The next item of correspondence is No. 1217B from Mr. Jerry Grant, who is the managing director of Irish Water, enclosing a note requested by the committee regarding the public private partnership post-project reviews that have been undertaken by Irish Water. I suspect people can note and consider that.

The next item of correspondence is No. 1122B from the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, providing additional documentation in respect of the Minister's minute in response to the Committee of Public Accounts report on the examination of financial statements in the third level sector. There is a considerable amount of information in this correspondence. I suggest we note it. I have a few observations to make on this issue at this point. It ties into our earlier discussion. When the Committee of Public Accounts issued a formal report on third level education, the Minister was obliged to give a formal reply to the committee. We were dissatisfied with the reply we received and we wrote back to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to say we did not accept some of what was in it. This committee challenged the response that was received from the Minister with voluminous documentation. I want to refer to that documentation in public, but I have no intention of reading it. We talked about the commercialisation of intellectual property, public investment in spin-out companies and the number of spin-out companies planned in 2008. The Minister has provided a detailed note on each of those topics. We also raised the obligations of third level institutions under the Standards in Public Office Act and the non-compliance with procurement guidelines referred to in the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General.

In response, the Minister has provided detailed statistical classification of the universities from the Central Statistics Office, detailed information regarding the severance arrangement circulars, the updated code of governance for the higher education sector and the revised reporting framework for 2016 and 2017. Appendix 1 contains detailed information about the Enterprise Ireland commercialisation fund in respect of every one of the third level institutions for each of 2015, 2016 and 2017. The figure runs to €44.286 million. All of that information should have been provided to us long before now. We should not have had to reject the earlier reply. This information was in the system. It should have been given to us on day 1. If we had glanced over the initial reply, we would be none the wiser today. I understand the Comptroller and Auditor General is looking at spin-out companies. I hope he has all this information. As Chairman, I believe we should have received this comprehensive and useful information on day 1, rather than at this late stage.

Before I call Deputies on this issue, I want to refer to two other documents that came with the documentation: a document reviewing intellectual property management and conflict of interest, which was printed in November; and a letter sent by the Higher Education Authority to all the higher education institutions about this committee's report on the higher education sector. An assessment of the sectoral classification of universities in Ireland under the EUROSTAT rules was mentioned the last day. The CSO has assessed that the seven universities should be classified as publicly controlled market producers outside the general government sector. That is the decision.

I would like to mention something intriguing that I was delighted to receive. We had a lot of meetings on the institutes of technology. We asked about corporate governance. We received a report from the Technological Higher Education Association of Ireland. Its code of governance for the institutes of technology was published on 1 January 2018. It sets out the codes of governance for all the third level institutions. A reporting note in respect of universities was also provided to us. They are all obliged to confirm that foundations and trusts have been or will be incorporated in financial statements in the future. I will explain what I found interesting about that. I ask Deputies to bear with me for a moment. I had never heard of the Technological Higher Education Association of Ireland. It seems that the association sets out the corporate governance rules for the institutes of technology sector. The existence of this organisation was never mentioned during our discussions on corporate governance. I immediately arranged for a search to be done to ascertain what this organisation is. I found out that the Technological Higher Education Association of Ireland essentially comprises direct representatives of the institutes themselves, which is fine. I have no issue with that information. I do not think it is widely known among the public. The institutes of technology provide the members of the board of the association. In effect, they write their own corporate governance rules.