Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Given that we are talking about €25,000 per racecourse, working from that figure, all the racecourses could be done for a very small portion of the €9.1 million. Three years have passed and it has not happened. We will seek clarification on that matter, the letter to the Department on the issue raised by Deputy Carthy, namely, the trickle-down effect of the prize money, and also the point regarding the submission from Mr. Kavanagh.

No. 398 from Mr. Mark Griffin, Secretary General of the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, dated 26 February 2021, provides a great deal of information arising from our meeting of 22 January 2021. It includes notes on the expenditure on external services during the procurement of the national broadband plan; RTÉ’s implementation of the Eversheds Sutherland report; annual expenditure and outputs on energy upgrade schemes since 2017; guidance issued by the National Cyber Security Centre to the health sector; the national retrofit scheme; the €8.6 million spent by EirGrid under selling and advertising in 2019; television licence compliance; and the use of temporary CCTV cameras to reduce illegal dumping.

At our meeting on 4 March, we decided to note and publish this correspondence and hold it over for consideration in public. We also agreed to request RTÉ to provide an update regarding the Eversheds Sutherland report and clarification on the 78 employment contracts and whether they were backdated to when the individuals started working with RTÉ. We have added RTÉ and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media to the work programme, and the secretariat is inquiring about availability for our first meeting after the Easter recess on 20 April.

The matter is flagged for discussion by Deputy Catherine Murphy and Deputy Carthy.