Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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I will be brief. Listening to this - and this is no criticism, as it is a big job - I can conclude that there is a decade in that. First the data has to be recorded, then the evidence will have to be produced from the data, and when all that is done, standards will have to be drawn up. Each of those, in the Irish way of doing business, will take a few years. If that was to go ahead, it would take a long time.

Let us take the cost of a building - a Garda station the OPW works on, a Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine building, or any building. The Department is probably carrying the costs of the porters and so on, and the OPW is carrying other costs such as maintenance. Some buildings are owned by clients of the OPW, and sometimes it is just part of the OPW's job because it is a State building. Would it make sense from the State's perspective for all the costs of the building to be under the OPW rather than in all the different Departments? For example, some of the school package is done by public private partnership, PPP. The cost of everything to do with that building could be obtained easily because that private body is responsible for the caretaker, the minding, the maintenance, the heating, the lights, the water, the rates, fixing the roof, and so on. It could tell anyone that it costs €3 million a year to keep that building as it is, but that cannot happen in the public service now because line Departments are carrying some of the costs, staff are coming from elsewhere, and so on. The other way is much simpler. Would there be a benefit in the OPW taking charge of that? I know it would be a massive policy change.