Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 5 May 2022

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:30 am

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

What does that mean? We have sought this information on a number of occasions. What does that mean when a Department says “We are not giving it to you”? The Secretary General says that, generally, this was the collective corporate and fiduciary responsibility of the Department of Health and the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board and also that, as Accounting Officer, "ultimate responsibility for this would lie with me". I am not sure if it would stand up in a court case if someone was to say, “It was not me, judge, it was the collective corporate and fiduciary responsibility of me and all around me”. This is a blatant refusal to provide information that this committee has sought. They have cited confidentiality and the commercially sensitive nature of the contents but they have not, in my view, convinced this committee that those considerations would prevent this. As Deputy Catherine Murphy said, if providing us with this documentation were genuinely to cause a problem and increase the costs of the project, or even create that potential, then, of course, we are a prudent committee and we would accept that. However, all we have been told is that it would, and we have not been given any clear guidance as to how it would or why it would. Considering that this is a contract, if people enter into a contract, it should not really matter whether they tell somebody what is in it in order to allow one party to be able to exploit that.

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