Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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It is a difficult issue for all of us. We all want to do what is best, but I do not think we can separate social protection from the underlying policy. If we just go by numbers and forget about the policy and the implications for people, that is tricky territory and one might be disappointed with the answer one receives. The officials will take note of any suggestion or recommendation made by the committee at the meeting today, as well as the points made by Deputy Brendan Ryan and others. We will try to come back with some thoughts on them.

In terms of an input from our sister Department which has an influence on all of our deliberations, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, it publishes the Revised Estimates Volume and as such, has a significant role to play, as the secretariat, in particular. knows. The Department's consideration of important policy and organisational outputs should be properly reflected. What I will do as Minister - members might feel free to do the same - is see if I can commission somebody to produce a paper on this issue for the Department. Nobody comes to mind immediately, but the policy, the organisation, the money spent and the results are all part of a moving process.

One cannot pull one out of the other. For example, one can have a great policy, but as we know from recent years, if one does not have enough money, one cannot pursue the policy to get the outcomes one needs. Equally, if one spends money with no policy attached, people might ask where the focus is in terms of doing the best with it. We might consider commissioning somebody with expertise in the area to advise us in terms of Ireland. I say that wearing my accounting hat. I have an accounting background, although not in public finance.

The other approach is to look at international best practice benchmarks where they are available and appropriate. That goes to the heart of the situation, such as when people are unemployed how one encourages them and helps them to avail of a process to get back into employment. We must look at what countries do this best and how we rate against them. In part, that involves the countries whose economies are doing best and growing because that is where one gets employment but, equally, we know at a time of full employment in Ireland we had jobless households where people were not employed. Again, we might ask somebody to do some work on that.

The secretariat's view is to ensure that the areas with the most expenditure have adequate performance target coverage. There is a school of auditing called the "cat's milk school of auditing", which may have operated in the Irish banks. One goes in and one checks something rather small, that is dear to people and cherished, such as the milk for the office cat and one checks whether that money was spent well but one loses sight of the bigger picture. We do not want to be in the "cat's milk school of auditing". We want to be in the school of auditing relating to the big items that add up to the significant expenditure of the Department. Some of my time was spent as an auditor in my early career.