Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Given there is consensus, the committee should do something about it.

A previous meeting of the committee was attended by the witnesses as well as officials from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. The expertise relevant to the issues to which Dr. McManus referred rests within the Department of Finance. If something is new to the AHB sector, it is also new to officials in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. The latter indicated clearly at the previous meeting that they needed input from the Department of Finance on the technicalities of resolving this issue. Until we asked officials from the Department of Finance about it at this committee and they had to answer our questions, there had been no sharing of that vital information with their colleagues in the other Department. My sense from talking to the Minister and officials in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government is that they would like to resolve this matter but they do not know how to do so. The Department of Finance is key to a resolution, which makes its original proposal all the more worrying.

On foot of this meeting, I propose that we write to both Departments to express our concern at the lack of progress and to insist that representatives from each attend a meeting of the committee at the earliest opportunity to explain their view on this issue. If we are saying there is an urgency to resolve it, whatever about the detail of how that is done, we need to express that urgency to the two Departments by way of a letter from the committee on foot of today's proceedings. Different members have different views, but we do not need to get into the details.