John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The more that is done to include local government in terms of accountability, the better. We will tease that out further with the officials when they appear before us.

Deputy Shanahan said that the Comptroller and Auditor General always deals with this in hindsight. He also referred to the latter or some committee of these Houses finding something exceptional that he or it decides to pursue. If this was within the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General, which is almost always the case looking back, it is going to be the PAC and the C and AG that will look at it. I encourage the Deputy to suggest, in a gentle way, that the C and AG should be empowered to look at any grants that are given out should they have to be pursued. It can be any level of grant. It does not necessarily have to happen every year but should it have to be pursued, for one reason or another, the option to pursue it should be there in legislation. The C and AG has a very positive role to play.

I mentioned the three-year period. That is also something we will come back to.

To highlight again, the ICT systems in the HSE and the Department of Health do not talk to one another. Maybe the investment is only happening now, but I think most of them operate in silos. I do not see any major investment taking place that would get Departments speaking to each other through reporting systems with which they and those in business would be familiar. I have often made the point that if a multinational - for example, a supermarket of some kind with outlets all over the country - can account for broken goods, profits and all sorts of things, surely to God there must be a system out there that the Government can buy into.

If there are questions regarding transparency, the Deputy should not be afraid to call that out. The system is not really used to transparency. It operates in the context of a certain ambiguity, about getting things done and so on. The example I want to give in respect of how things get done is as follows. The Deputy was involved in campaigning for the university in the south east. This feeds into decision-making. The Deputy knows that the group which continually met with the Minister and those who were supporting a university and both of the institutes of technology insisted there would be a campus in Kilkenny. Outside of the debate or of the group meeting, however, there is no mention of it. There is absolutely no reference to it in the report from the college. That is shocking, because everyone agreed to what was going on based on the separation of the different campus-style approaches that were going to be taken. That has not happened. I am raising the matter because this is a decision that will affect the economic outputs of anything and everything in the south east. It has just been abandoned, which I feel pretty put out about. I will be raising the matter again.

I cannot disagree with anything in the Bill. I am trying to assist by giving Deputy Shanahan some ideas. He can take them or leave them. As stated, we will consult with the officials and the Minister as to how it can be teased out further. The committee will not stand in the way, as far as time goes, in dealing with it. At the end of the process, I hope we may have a Bill that is gentle but that has an edge to it.

Are there any closing remarks that people wish to make?