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

I apologise for being late. I suppose, in some senses, today's discussion is less about policy because that is really for the Minister and the programme for Government. This is more about how the Department sets out those policies in a strategic statement. I will restrict my questions to those areas rather than policy areas because that is for another meeting.

Many of us are interested, in the first instance, to know what is the status of Rebuilding Ireland as the framework within which the most recent strategy was set. Is that to expire at the end of 2021? Is it to be replaced next year? Can Ms Quinn give us a little bit of information about that? That is about the strategic context but also the messaging context. There is a separate website and communications strategy and all of that for Rebuilding Ireland.

Data protection is the other big issue. One of the roles of this committee, as our guests know, is to monitor the implementation of the commitments and strategies in the programme for Government. We have had many disputes around data over the past number of years. We are aware that the Department deals with phenomenal volumes of data but sometimes the way in which data are presented or the timing of data can make it genuinely difficult for the committee to properly scrutinise. Is that something the Department is reviewing? Do our guests have thoughts on that in the context of the strategy?

Monitoring is exactly the point. One of the best reports the Department produces is the social housing construction pipeline report. It is a very detailed piece of work that lets us all know, per project and local authority area, where construction is in the pipeline. It would be really great to have the same report for, for example, the Traveller accommodation programmes or other key aspects of delivery such as affordable housing through the serviced sites fund. Is that possible?

The other challenge that many of us have is obtaining data. Many of us are really interested in the Rebuilding Ireland home loan scheme. The Department publishes data but not always in ways that allows us to compare the number of applicants with the number of approvals and drawdowns, etc. How is the Department looking at reviewing and rethinking the presentation of that data? I know that there has been increased involvement with the Central Statistics Office, CSO, and the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, in some of the research. If we had better, cleaner, simpler data, it would allow us to properly track all of those things.