Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I join in welcoming the Secretary General and her officials. It is nice to see some familiar faces from my old Department. I am delighted to have the opportunity to pose some questions.

I will stay on the Covid-19 restart grant schemes. In that context, the Comptroller and Auditor General stated:

A grant scheme that relies on self-declaration should have a number of key controls. One of these is the completion of post payment checks to ensure that claimants had satisfied the conditions of the scheme and were accordingly entitled to the payments they received.

The Secretary General stated: "I should emphasise that any consideration of the oversight of the restart schemes must have due regard to the circumstances in which those schemes were designed and launched". We have to try to reconcile the two. It would be useful to articulate in concise terms how the Department intends to answer the questions posed by the Comptroller and Auditor General. It is widely acknowledged that money flowed into businesses quickly and it was a responsive scheme in that regard. However, questions have been posed and it would be useful to understand the timelines for any review or what such a review would look like.