Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 19 January 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Statement of Strategy 2017: Department of Finance

10:00 am

Photo of Pearse DohertyPearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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If the proverbial hits the fan in a couple of years time, I do not want to find out that Mr. Moran was asking for additional staff or believed that there was a need for an additional capacity within the Department of Finance. I want him to tell the committee now or I want him to say that he is satisfied and, therefore, if things go wrong, we can hold him to account. I want him to tell this committee that he is satisfied with the staff resources that he has, that he is not looking for anything else and that he believes that the team is robust enough to deal with the challenges. I commend the work that the Department of Finance did at a time when Brexit was not being talked about as a possibility. There is no doubt it was outstanding work. It is now eight months since Brexit was voted for. We have clear indications that it will be a hard Brexit with a hard Border. We cannot be harking back to something that happened a year and a half ago. It is different. That was a hypothetical scenario. Now we know it is real. In the next couple of weeks, it is going to get very intense because we are competing with Britain and other member states and we need to be at our best game. Is the witness completely satisfied with the number of staff he has on the core team and everywhere else within the divisions of the Department of Finance?