Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Correspondence No. 1472 is from Mr. Maurice Quinn, Secretary General of the Department of Defence, date 5 July 2018 providing a note on UN reimbursements. Only €3.4 million was outstanding at the end of 2017. We note and publish that.

Correspondence No. 1473 is from Mr. Robert Watt, Secretary General of Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, dated 5 July 2018 outlining the process involved in the review of the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 and also providing a copy of the review. That review is too large to get into today. We will consider the issue of how the State is dealing with protected disclosure. The report is there. I have looked at it. It is lovely in that if one reads it, one would almost think it was working well. I felt the report was missing testimonials from people who made protected disclosures. They seemed to have consulted with stakeholders but there is an absence of testimonials from the people who made the disclosures.

We will return to this issue in the autumn. We asked for one specific issue in our correspondence, namely, a list of people who made submissions. Chapter 5 of the review deals with the submissions. It gives an overview, the thematic issues raised and a consideration of those points. However, our first question was about who made submissions. That would normally be published. When someone makes a submission to a public body, the advertisement will say that the submission will be put on the website. I am shocked that we have not been given the names of that. We requested it at the previous meeting when protected disclosures arose. We had a letter telling us that this was under way. We were shocked to know it was under way as we did not seem to know about it. They say that Oireachtas Members were notified on the matter by email on 25 August 2017, and that there were advertisements in the newspaper in August 2017 and that the closing date for submission was 10 October. The submissions might be on their website.

Apart from discussion on this, I propose that we invite Transparency International Ireland, which sent us a report on this, before the committee, primarily because the Department's review relies heavily on Transparency International Ireland's own report. The Department's report includes several charts illustrating the finance of the survey which are reproduced with the permission of Transparency International Ireland. Since its report has had a significant input into that of the Department, it is important that we hear from it. We will have to organise the sequencing of the witnesses. It looks as though Transparency International Ireland got closer to the bone of the issue than the Department. Is it agreed that we include it? It would be in the autumn work programme.