Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It will be in the new year as there is only a fortnight of the session left. We will go through our work programme for the new year next week and try to sign off on priorities from the committee's point of view and the sequence in which we want to deal with them. That is noted and published. Sorry, it is not. The letter was from an individual and we can discuss it in the context of the meeting to which we have just referred.

No. 1742 is from Deputy Catherine Murphy and concerns a proposal regarding our forthcoming meeting with the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment. We note this and will return to it when we are considering the work programme. Deputy Murphy can raise the matter later in the meeting when she is present also. The letter says that when the Department is in next week, she wants us to consider extending an invitation to BT, Eir, Image, Siro and Enet as they will be in a position to give evidence from a non-departmental perspective. We have that request. I propose that next week's meeting goes ahead as scheduled as we are not going to mix the private sector with the Department at such short notice. We may consider inviting some of those companies to provide us with information other than what we are hearing from the Department. Other companies came here in the past, for example, in the context of the Project Eagle report. When it came to the CervicalCheck issue, Vicky Phelan and Stephen Teap provided a very important counterbalance to what we were told by the HSE. It helped us in our work.

I am of a mind to do that but we will wait. We might discuss it in the course of the afternoon. It will not happen for next Thursday but possibly at a later date.

We then have No. 1746 from Deputy Alan Kelly, who is requesting further details from the HEA regarding the implementation of employee assistance helplines and the names of the firms providing them across all colleges. We will forward the schedule that Deputy Kelly has provided.