Mr. Ciar?n Hayes:

I am a former chief executive of Sligo County Council. I thank the committee for the opportunity to address it. I can perhaps advise the members of the position from the perspective of both sides of the table. The situation is that the audit committees in the local authorities are independent and chaired by an independent body. They have representatives from the council on them. Generally, the audit committees are supported by the internal auditor in the local authority and the internal audit staff. At the start of the year, the audit committee would have its programme of work set out and agreed by its members. Particular areas can be specified for examination throughout the year. It is then a matter for the chief executive to go in and deal with the issues directly with the independent audit committee.

Interestingly, Deputy McAuliffe mentioned the issue of service level agreements, SLAs. This is an area that NOAC is starting to examine. We must be specific concerning these service level agreements, given the range of such existing agreements. The Deputy mentioned examples such as the provision of services in the areas of firefighting, homelessness, waste, climate, public procurement and dangerous substances. There is a whole array of public private partnerships, PPPs, as well, and, in some respects, those can also be treated as service level agreements because contracts must be entered into.

Within the working group structure in NOAC, we are currently trying to be specific to be able to deal with those-----