Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Tánaiste for his presentation. He has been quoted as saying that this new agency will be an Irish FBI for white-collar crime. This certainly sounds very impressive, until one looks at the budgeting for the organisation over the past number of years. The budget was just €6 million. I compared that to the amount of money the previous Government spent on welfare cheats. I remember that famous campaign that I think he fronted: "Welfare cheats cheat us all". That was a campaign costing €163,000 that yielded just €300,000 in repayments. I did a bit of digging and I noticed there are 277 social welfare inspectors in the Department of Social Protection and a further 98 assigned to the special investigation unit. In budgetary terms, that is a minimum of €15 million in salaries. My first question, therefore, is how the Tánaiste explains this dichotomy over the years he has been in Government and has been leading Government, whereby we spend a minimum of three times as much chasing welfare spongers - one might call them poor criminals - as we do on the white-collar criminal class.