Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 9 May 2019

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of Seán FlemingSeán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

For the public record, we had a private meeting scheduled for yesterday to discuss documents produced by the secretariat as a result of the various meetings we have held in recent months. One of these documents is on broadband and the metropolitan area networks and the other is on housing. The timescale would have been quite tight with regard to discussing it yesterday and finalising it today - after our meeting with the Garda Síochána - with a view to getting absolute clearance for publication next week.

I always took the view that we could not publish it within 48 hours of the local and European elections. It was always going to be a tight squeeze to get it out eight days in advance of the elections, which is the middle of next week. When the Government announced its intention to appoint a preferred bidder for the national broadband plan, and we can now see there is a highly charged political debate between the Government and the Opposition, I felt that for the Committee of Public Accounts to wade in to discuss and finalise a report on broadband might be perceived as the committee wading into a current political controversy. I took the view that I do not want the committee to be accused of this. We might not have had agreement in any event because different views are held by Government members and Opposition members. I felt the most prudent thing to do was to hold it over. We will certainly complete our work but I felt that in the politically charged debate during these days I did not want to involve the committee at this time. We will certainly complete our work as soon as is practical. As Chairman I felt it was better not to proceed. The secretariat phoned around and two thirds of the committee agreed to postpone. We will come back to it.

I also felt that a lot of the information that came out on Tuesday may have been relevant to incorporate in our report, which we would not have been able to sign off within 24 or 48 hours of the documentation becoming available. I felt the prudent thing to do was to let the political side of it get out of the way and then the Committee of Public Accounts would do its work, as it always does, outside of the current political controversy.

I acknowledge publicly that Deputy Catherine Murphy was keen that the meeting should have proceeded as scheduled and I accept this. The majority took the opposite view. I accept that a significant part of the work prepared by the secretariat was on the metropolitan area networks but because it was connected to broadband in the same report I felt we could not go into it in this political climate. The idea was, subject to agreement of the committee, that we would publish two reports simultaneously on the same day.

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