Mr. Peter Finnegan:

Before I answer that question, I thank the Deputy for his kind words on the commemoration. I will pass that onto the team. It was truly a team effort. It was a great privilege to be involved and to be in Leinster House at the time of the centenary of the Dáil.

The ICT expenditure has exceeded the budget but this was due to a conscious decision taken by us in the first quarter of 2018. We track our expenditure carefully. We have monthly management meetings and it became apparent to us that we were going to have a significant underspend in 2018, which was the last year of our financial cycle. Under the funding regulations that apply under the Act, we cannot carry forward the allocation to subsequent years. We took the view that the most appropriate thing to do was to invest €8 million further in services and essentially bring forward expenditure that we had planned for later years. That is why we did that.

We consider the ICT programme to be very important. The background is that there was significant underinvestment in ICT in the Houses, probably for 15 years. Statistics indicate that one should spend in the region of 10% of one’s annual budget on ICT, but we hovered around 6% or 7% and that dropped during the downturn. Our systems were quite old and outdated and we needed to significantly upgrade them. One of the things of which we are conscious in terms of ICT expenditure is our ability to support Members. We have a new generation of Members within Leinster House, with 70% having spent fewer than ten years here. All of our Members use modern ICT in their work and we need to be able to support that, particularly things such as mobile devices.

The second big issue relates to what we discussed earlier, namely, public engagement. ICT is a key strategy in our engagement with the public because it allows us to reach out and it allows the public to reach in. It is about having a Parliament that is accessible to the people. That has been a strong objective for us over the past year. Understandably, there has been criticism of the Oireachtas from time to time, but our view is that unless people experience it and see the work being done by Members, such as at committees, it will be impossible to change that perception. People who come to Leinster House are invariably impressed. The type of ICT investment we are making will allow people to do things they do anyway on their phones. If one is going home on the bus in the evening, one will check the news and weather and one might look up real-time passenger information for the next bus. One can also look at what is going on in the Oireachtas, including the committees. It is very important to be able to showcase the work that is going on in the Oireachtas and allow people to form an independent view of it.