Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I respect anyone's right to raise any issues here at a meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts. I am thinking of the scale of the task ahead of us. Commercial semi-State organisations must make commercial calculations so inevitably with such a remit there will be losses as well as successes. Let us consider the scale of public spending in the HSE, for example, which is more than €20 billion. I think that we could have multiple meetings of this committee on that budget line alone. I wonder whether investigating what happened with the show is the best use of our time. I think that Deputy Verona Murphy is right. The context of this discussion should be when RTÉ seeks public funding in the context of a licence fee and so on. I hope that I am not wrong about this but I am not sure that RTÉ is directly responsible to the Committee of Public Accounts.