Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am in favour of the latter option because we have been at this for three weeks now and the committee has not got a satisfactory acceptance from the Secretary General. There was a bit of movement in the letter the committee received yesterday, although only a bit. This can be resolved with a little will. There is no reason these Estimates need to be deferred for longer than a short a period of time. They should be taken today but the committee has unanimously tried to facilitate the Minister and the official, Mr. Paul Quinn, coming before the committee and we have been unsuccessful.

I did not want to take this action. I have spoken to the Secretary General about this matter. The Department is accountable to this committee. When a committee has unanimously decided to ask a Secretary General to appear before it he or she should be willing to appear. We all have our own schedules and demands. We agreed between five and six dates in a period of three weeks that we are willing to facilitate the Secretary General's appearance.

I suggest we defer. The problem might be resolved by a phone call and we can come back promptly and deal with it and, if not, we need to defer to another day.