Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Very well. We want to ensure that projects take a whole-of-Government approach if funding comes from various sources and not just the line Department. We also want the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to have a policy on reports. A public spending update is to be published, or perhaps it has already been published. One recommendation is that training should be mandatory. While training is currently provided, it is not mandatory. Some of the people working on projects do not bother to undergo training on the public spending code. That is insufficient.

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform should insist that every project review, evaluation or value-for-money report carried out in a Department must include a section on the whole-of Government lessons from what went wrong in the unit in question. Such reports must be considered inadequate without this section. The public service is designed to confine a mistake it to the one unit in which it takes place. We have seen this in the HSE. When something goes wrong in a hospital, there is not even a mechanism in place to share the lessons learned with other hospitals. We are seeing here that when something goes wrong in the cultural division, the issue is confined to that unit of that Department. That is guaranteed to ensure that there is no whole-of-Government learning. We will ask the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to ensure that spending codes include a requirement for every report to have a section outlining the overall lessons for the public service. Unless there is a practice of sharing of lessons learned, the current system is bound to make the same mistakes in some other Department.