Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 25 September 2025
Public Accounts Committee
Financial Statements 2024: Houses of the Oireachtas Commission
2:00 am
Mr. Donnacha McKeon:
The only thing I can think of is, and I can say right from the start, is that there are no duties being removed that would remove headcount. There is the same amount of headcount in the galleries. What I can think of is that the new graphics system, which is part of the upgrade of the control rooms and video router which we completed in 2024, has a function on it that we can take information directly from the procedural system and essentially pump that into our graphics system. What was happening before was that it was a manual process where one of the part-time workers, in conjunction with my Civil Service team, would be handed a piece of paper and then would have to type it in each morning. What we have now is a digital library of names, titles and business that the graphic operator can select. What it does is it removes a completely onerous task but also ensures the bilingual graphics we have started to use in the past year are as accurate as possible.