Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 13 April 2017

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of Seán FlemingSeán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

As we have a quorum, the committee is now in public session. We are joined today by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Mr. Seamus McCarthy, a permanent witness to the committee. He is accompanied by Mr. Malachy Quinn, senior auditor. We have received no apologies at this stage.

The first item on the agenda is the minutes of last week's meetings on 6 April. Are the minutes of last week's meeting agreed? Agreed. With regard to matters arising from the minutes, if members want to raise items under correspondence that they feel might be relevant to last week's meeting, we can do that. We will come to correspondence in a moment. We will move on to the next item on the agenda, item No. 3.

We will deal with some of last week's meeting first. We have some correspondence arising from last week's meetings but we will deal with it under matters arising. We are all fully aware we had a meeting with a number of institutions from the third level sector and we are waiting for information back from most of them at this stage. From UCC we are waiting on a number of things including its policy on intellectual property rights, the management of conflicts of interest, a note on the IMI transfer, retired staff on contract and financial assistance to students. From the University of Limerick, we are waiting on items such as a note paid to the Revenue on sabbatical figures, details on non-Irish students, a note on the Mazars review and a note on the number of complaints leading to internal and external reports or settlement. That follows on from the issue of whistleblowers. We have received a response to our correspondence from Dundalk IT which is in our correspondence list this morning. From Waterford Institute of Technology we are waiting for further information on the campus company FeedHenry. We are awaiting details on staffing such as gender breakdown and details of full-time and part-time staff, further information on the library subscription service as well as implications of the delay to the Grangegorman development. From NUIG among the things we are waiting for is information on procurement, gender and staffing, casualisation of staff contracts, and university shares as they relate to intellectual property. We are also waiting for information from the HEA and the Department of Education and Skills on these matters.

There are a lot of issues arising from our meetings in the last couple of weeks with the third level institutions. We will give a little bit of time for the information to come back which hopefully will be over the next week. When we are here again, we will have hopefully received responses to all the matters that we have raised with them at their meeting. We will need to consider what action to take at that point. Does anybody have any comment?