Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Perhaps that issue could be dealt as part of the agenda for later meetings.

I thank Mr. Egan, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Corcoran for their time this morning. It would be useful for the committee to have a further bilateral engagement on the targets. It would be beneficial in benchmarking what is going on.

We might schedule a further meeting in the autumn to do that in advance of the management board considering this. Supplementary welfare allowance as a single line of claims tells us a great deal about what is happening across the social welfare system rather than us being provided with a number of these outputs, some of which are very useful but some of which are of little benefit to us as a committee in measuring what is actually going on and the impact, which is what we are supposed to look at, namely, the impact of the money we are spending on society as a whole. We thank our witnesses for agreeing to that further engagement and we will come back to them in the autumn on that. I also thank them for their time this morning.

I know we receive the book of statistics annually from the Department, but it would probably be useful in the interim if the Department could circulate that again to the members of the committee, just so that we have a scope of the data which have already been collected. We are not talking about reinventing the wheel here, but looking at data which are already available that would be more reflective, from our perspective, of the activity within the Department.