Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. McCarthy and the team from NOAC and congratulate them on the quality of the material they presented to the committee and on their impressive website. Earlier today, the committee had a private meeting and had Wexford, Leitrim and Galway county councillors quoting reports as part of the correspondence and they are very impressive. With such quality, are we getting enough circulation about it and enough people tapping into and reading it? There are a lot of data, information and resources gone into that.

It was interesting to hear the question Deputy McAuliffe touched on about data. One always has to validate data. That is an important point NOAC needs to make as an independent oversight body. It gets all sorts of data. I asked the same question of chief executives of some local authorities recently and the director of services in one of the same authorities, and I got two different responses. We always have the fall-back of parliamentary questions, or Commencement matters in the Seanad, and it is about that consistency or inconsistency.

I will take up two or three points. First, Mr. McCarthy mentioned in his opening statement that a Minister can request his organisation to carry out a report. Has a Minister in the past two or three years asked it to commission any report? If so, what was the response to the report?