Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 February 2017

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of Seán FlemingSeán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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We should not be giving out to the Secretary General for non-receipt of it; he is guilty of sending it in too early. He caught us on the hop. We will all get a copy of that.

I will move on to correspondence, No. 266C, i to iv, and No. 267, i to ii. This is correspondence from last week where we are awaiting another explanatory note. It all relates to payment of public moneys by Dublin City Council to Ballymun regeneration programme. We agreed to forward this correspondence to the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government and when the Secretary General is before the committee on 2 March, we will discuss this matter further. We have put him on notice of that. There is a new item of correspondence here today. Do any members have anything further to add or can we just keep it on the file until 2 March? Is that agreed? Agreed. We have sent it on.

The next item is No. 275C, i to iii, a letter from an anonymous source which attached a newspaper article regarding lease agreements entered into by the OPW. We note that. It is just a newspaper article.

The next item is No. 277C, an e-mail received from two individuals who are involved in the ongoing case with the University of Limerick. The secretariat has written to the Office of the Parliamentary Legal Adviser for advice on this matter. I propose that at our next meeting, the committee gets a brief from the parliamentary legal adviser on this particular issue. We are also scheduling the third level institutions to appear before the committee in April. I suggest we inform the University of Limerick that this topic will be discussed at that meeting. We will come to that meeting in our work programme in a few minutes. We note that.

The next item is No. 297C, i and ii, from NAMA regarding the sale of a property in Dublin 8 and an issue raised by Sager Management Limited. The correspondence explains that the situation has been dealt with, that the individual has been contacted and is engaging in the process. I propose we note this correspondence from NAMA. Is that greed? Agreed. For the record, it is interesting to note that although NAMA was the secured lender on the property, the property remained under the control of the debtor and it seems NAMA is at arm's length from the actual sales process. NAMA has been in direct contact with the individual.

No. 4 is statement and accounts received since the last meeting. They will come up on the screen now. They are in front of us. No. 4.1 is Leopardstown Park Hospital board, clear audit opinion; Aquaculture Licences Appeals Board, clear audit opinion; Health Service Executive, patient private property accounts, clear audit opinion but attention is drawn to the issue of internal control. That is specifically on our work programme. On 9 March, we will deal with the HSE specifically on the patient private property accounts and the fair deal scheme. We will deal with other HSE issues separately. Those two items are specifically on our agenda.

The next item is No. 4.4 is special account for the purposes of the Health (Repayment Scheme) Act 2006, clear audit opinion. The next item is the Repayment Scheme (Donations) Fund. There were nil proceeds to that account in 2015. It was very easy to get a clear audit report when there were no transactions. That was an account whereby the Repayment Scheme (Donations) Fund was set up to receive voluntary donations from beneficiaries of the scheme to be used to fund improvements in health services for dependent old persons and persons with disabilities. People will recall that some people were in institutions without the proper legal sanction and they sought refunds of charges and everything like that and €1.67 million was paid out in 2015. Many families felt they got very good service and they made a donation back of the amount received. Other families chose, in recognition of the happy service they received, not to make a claim in the first place.

Can the Comptroller and Auditor General tell us if there is much left to be paid in that fund? Is it nearly over?