Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The fact remains that the Secretary General is the Accounting Officer. It is the entitlement of any committee of the Dáil to seek to have the presence of the Accounting Officer. That is a well-established precedent. We all understand people who are Accounting Officers are very busy people and, of course, there is the matter of the Secretary General arranging his diary. Nobody is disputing any of that. What we are concerned about, in the context of the extraordinary events, where we are here talking to the Minister who has been very helpful to the committee - I wish to acknowledge that publicly, when he is here in person with one of his deputy Ministers, which is all to the good - but the fact is that the Secretary General in the Civil Service structure is the Accounting Officer. The Minister is not the Accounting Officer. We had plans which were approved by Government on spending which went, I believe the Minister would agree, almost totally off the rails for a variety of reasons resulting in a massive cost to taxpayers and a massive delay to a project cherished by almost everybody in the country. The matters are very significant and important. The sums are very significant and important, as are the implications of what has happened as to how Government governs. The Minister's document today is full of commitments to reform to ensure transparent and effective public systems. That is something that we want to see on behalf of taxpayers.

One might say that this is a dispute about dates but it is easily resolved by an absolute confirmation that within a reasonable timeframe the Secretary General will attend the committee, subject to his other commitments. He is obviously a very busy person which is not in dispute. The committee has set out to facilitate him out of respect for him and his office. At the end of the day, the Minister, as Minister, expects that the Secretaries General as Accounting Officers will be available to relevant committees.

We are not talking about some hierarchy of committees. The fact is that given the oversight management function of the Department of Finance, which Department is responsible to the Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, Committee of Public Accounts and the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. That is what the Dáil has decided to and we all have to live with that. The Minister must live with that as Minister, but so must the Secretaries General. We are asking for a reasonable arrangement of availability on the part of the Secretary General. Otherwise, a precedent will be set which will be really bad for democracy where Secretaries Generals would feel empowered to either defer, over a long period of time or even refuse to meet the committees of the Dáil in the exercise of the Accounting Officer functions for which they are responsible. From that point of view, the Chairman's proposal that there might be a short adjournment during which a pathway would be identified where this can be resolved to the satisfaction of everybody is an acceptable and sensible one.