Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Hearne. My final question is on that because that is exactly what we hope will happen; that it will become a different kind of approach. Ultimately, I focused on budget really although as Mr. Hearne said, this is around public service performance in that sense. This question is about public service performance - I know I mentioned procurement so this is not necessarily around the awarding of contracts or that kind of piece - and tracking the kinds of indicators the Department develops in a cross-cutting way around our services working well and our public services delivering and ensuring those kinds of indicators get tracked in when the services are outsourced or contracted out. Is the Department confident that those measures are there, as I said, not just in terms of the award of tender but in the monitoring of how it works?

Does Mr. Hearne have comments on the upward stream measure? As I said, we know that at European level there are what used to be the country-specific recommendations. There is beginning to be a real push that any semester process that would happen in the future might have different kinds of measures almost very close to that idea of the well-being measures or SDG measurements in terms of how well countries are doing. Is that an active conversation in terms of bringing these new kinds of metrics and tracking them when things are contracted out, and also maybe influencing the debate at a wider European level, which we know is happening around what we measure and what we value?