Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. We have seen examples of effective communication of financial information with the public in other countries, which we hope will be in our report.

He touched on the issue of Estimates and I would like to go back to it. We in the committee have talked a lot around the treatment by sectoral committees of budgets in general, Estimates and Supplementary Estimates. One issue that arisen is the fact that we are somewhat an outlier compared to other EU countries. We do not approve or take a view on Estimates or Supplementary Estimates and get them quite late in the budgetary cycle. The Oireachtas does not approve the SPU, for example, and unlike almost every other European country, there is no facility for the Opposition to amend the budget. Is there any particular reason for that? We know from the parliament in Westminster that part of that is historic, in its view. We had a particularly interesting conversation with representatives of the Scottish Parliament which, because it was set up more recently, has more effective mechanisms for this kind of oversight.

I would like to hear the general approach of both Ministers to the lack of opportunity for the Oireachtas to approve things such as the stability programme update, sectoral committees' inability to take a position on Estimates, and the inability to amend the budget.