Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It was not acceptable this morning. One could have this crazy scenario in order to avoid any questions on a particular line of expenditure that one would simply move it to another Department and then no historical questions can be asked because the new Department says that was historical and the old one says it can no longer answer questions in relation to that because it has moved.

It appears that these issues of emergency accommodation are arising all the time. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, in the new Department that is dealing with these areas, confirmed in the Dáil today that the catering firm Aramark has been given a contract to provide meals to Ukrainian refugees and that there has been no procurement process employed at all. That raises a red flag to me. Every time there is an emergency and there are poor people in difficulty someone manages to make a lot of money out of it and there are always question marks in respect of the process employed.

In respect of this correspondence, I suggest that we write to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform requesting whether or not it has evaluated this move on the part of the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and whether it has a view on this contract. We should seek from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the full details of the contract - the timeframe, the money involved and the safeguards that have been put in place.

It strikes me that it is never a set of local catering companies that get these contracts. It is always huge corporations and in this instance, one that has had a lot of question marks with regard to previous ones.