Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We will come back to that issue next week. It is agreed to note and publish item No. 2488, pending the consent of the Higher Education Authority, HEA. If the HEA does not consent to the publication of the correspondence, it is proposed to only publish the letter from UL. Is that agreed? Agreed.

We will move on to category C, which is correspondence from and relating to private individuals or any other correspondence.

The first item is No. 2454, which is from Senator Craughwell and has been flagged for attention. The problem I have with this is that it is a two-sentence letter saying that he would be obliged if the Committee of Public Accounts would carry out a full investigation into the funding of NGOs and what benefits accrue to citizens of the State from this funding. We can see in the image below that just one NGO was funded to the tune of €1.085 million. There is a list, and he copied it onto the page. Is it agreed to note that item of correspondence? It is not clear. He said the Committee of Public Accounts should carry out a full investigation into every NGO, but I think we should write back to him and ask him if there is one particular on which he wishes the Committee of Public Accounts to carry out an examination. I am not clear about what he is asking of us here. He said he wants a full investigation into the funding of NGOs and benefits. How many NGOs are there?