Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The appointment of a Secretary General in any Department is a matter for Government and is set out in the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924. That is a fundamental point that I want to underline. My officials have co-operated, in my view, with the committee. Letters have been responded to. I am not aware of specific information that the Chairman says the committee has not received but I will check. As far as I can see, we have responded to the correspondence we received from the Chairman on behalf of the committee.

On the recovery and resilience fund, the Ministers for Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform are preparing a Government submission to Europe and have been in touch with the European Commission. It has to be broadly aligned to the EU's recovery and resilience programme and the thematic approach the commission has adopted. Significant parts of that will involve investment in the green economy and digital transformation. The allocation to Ireland in grants is expected to be approximately €915 million over a four-year period. The Government is identifying priorities in the context of that plan and will submit it to Brussels in the first week of May, I think. That is the essence of it. I have talked to both Ministers. The Government is still working on prioritising, and has been doing a lot of work on this over the past while and has been engaged with the Commission. It also involves country-specific reforms that the Commission may indicate it would like to see consistency in fulfilling reforms it wants in the broader economy. It will represent a distinct piece of work involving how to strategically use the grants that will come from that fund. The idea is to concentrate it on some key strategic priorities in digital transformation and the green economy to create jobs. A broader national economic recovery plan will be published subsequent to that. There is also the national development plan that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is preparing, which will be a ten-year plan on the structural projects. There is also the Brexit adjustment reserve fund. Those are four big pieces of work in the Government's investment agenda, which we will announce during 2021 with a view to developing the economy after.