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

Obviously, a very comprehensive letter went from the Committee of Public Accounts to the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. I completely concur that that captured many of the concerns we collectively had, and that letter came about as a consequence of a collaborative effort to make sure the issues we were concerned about were adequately covered. I subsequently read in an article that the intention is to reply to the finance committee, which is investigating this and has a different remit to ourselves, but that the Department will reply to everyone on the same day. The article gave the impression that we were all going to be at loggerheads with each other. The key issue is that we get to the origin of how this decision was made, what the process was, who was involved in it and what the knock-on consequences are likely to be.

As to the piece of work we are going to do, it is important, every time we come up with a constraint in regard to our work, that we name the change that has happened in regard to the Committee of Public Accounts, and that is the standing order the Chairman himself read out at the beginning of the meeting, Standing Order 218. That imposes pretty strict restrictions on what we can do as opposed to what we were able to do before. While it does not look like we will be the committee that will be investigating this particular aspect, there is a wider aspect that we are considering. Obviously, we are looking for an extension of our remit to inquire into such matters, which I think will be very helpful in looking at the broader issues of process and public pay, particularly at the high end.

The Chairman or the clerk might go through exactly what the timeline is for us to get a response from the committee on procedure on that. We will have to put that into our work programme in a timely way because it is a complementary piece of work that we will do alongside the work that is obviously going to be undertaken by the finance committee. The one thing we, as politicians, should not be is to be at loggerheads with each other on this. If the other committee is going to deal with this, I am perfectly happy that it will do that and it will do that job thoroughly. However, I think there is another solid piece of work for us to do, and that is what we are seeking to do and seeking an extension of our remit to do.

This is going to keep coming up over and over again because this constraint on our remit, as it relates to what it was like before, is a significant change to how the Committee of Public Accounts operates.