Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 26 September 2019

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of Catherine MurphyCatherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I asked parliamentary questions about consultancy contracts in each Department just before the summer. I asked what work they had undertaken, and the costs ran into tens of millions of euro. Some of them are one-off projects and one can understand why they are necessary for speciality services, but there were things like internal audit etc. I understand there is a shortage of accountants, but this was in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 and they were routinely used. The Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform was at a summer school and said it concerned him, and that there was a need to be much more thoughtful about engaging consultants from the point of view of value for money. We should start with value for money because it has to be questioned whether people are taking a risk-averse approach or whether behaviour needs to change. There is an issue with building up an institutional memory and institutional capacity with regard to capital projects, where we build up the expertise in the entities in question, meaning we have to engage them repeatedly. It is almost self-fulfilling that we keep going to these companies. There is a multiplicity of aspects to this and I will send the Chairman the replies to my parliamentary questions as they suggest an agenda to this.

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