Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Nobody disputes that. The reality, however, is that there was awareness of this matter. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform cannot sit here and say it is okay for a Minister to be aware of a serious overrun on the major capital project of our time and not inform the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform or the line Minister, particularly in the middle of a budgetary process when he is bringing forward Estimates for expenditure for the following year. I am sure the Minister would not want the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, or any other Minister to believe it is okay not to bring to the attention of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform an overrun of hundreds of millions of euro in his or her Department of which he or she is aware but which may not be fully quantified. He would not want to set as an example for Ministers that they can simply quantify the overrun and, once that work has been finished, bring up the matter in a routine meeting with officials of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. That would simply not be acceptable. I understand the difficult position the Minister is in, given that this involves his party colleague, but this is completely unacceptable. We have a Department of Public Expenditure and Reform for a reason. We will deal with this in more detail because we have asked the Secretary General of the Department to come before us. We need to ensure there are robust procedures in place for tracking public expenditure. We all thought that those procedures were in place. Is the Minister really sending out a message to line Ministers that if they are aware of a substantial overrun in a project, it does not really matter if they do not inform the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform or the relevant officials for a number of months?