Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

As I said in my remarks, Ministers are accountable through the Oireachtas for their Departments and they must accept this accountability. Secretaries General are accountable to the Committee of Public Accounts for their Department's Vote. There are, therefore, clear lines of accountability. I will ask the Department to make available the briefing notes received by the three Ministers. I have no problem with making information available. As the Deputy knows, all such information was provided to Mr. Travers.

As politicians, we all engage in cat calls across the floor of the House. Perhaps we are all subjective to such an extent that when a report does not say what we would like it to say, we are inclined to put things into it that are not there. I hope I am a person who is fair in regard to any decisions I have made and any judgments to which I have come. I assure Members I have certainly sought to be extremely fair in regard to these matters. I am not into scapegoating anybody, particularly public servants.

The report is very clear in regard to its conclusions. It states, for example, that Ministers can be faulted for not probing more deeply. However, it continues by observing that these shortcomings were of a scale, substance and order of magnitude considerably less than those of the system of public administration. That is the finding of Mr. Travers. The report further states that the fundamental reason for the period of time that elapsed from 1976 until October 2004, when the Attorney General was asked for advice, lies in "long-term systemic corporate failure" and that this failure is "principally a failure of public administration which, essentially, failed to identify, recognise and acknowledge" the situation. I do not get any pleasure in saying this. As I said yesterday, I have had the pleasure over the last five months of working with committed, professional and thorough civil servants in the Department of Health and Children. I want to work with them to put in place the excellent recommendations in this report.

Mr. Travers is a man of enormous integrity with whom many Members from all sides of the House have worked in various roles in different Departments and organisations. These are his conclusions based on what he saw, was told and discovered. We must be decent enough to accept them and to make changes where such are required. That is what I want do because, above all else, we must look to the future in regard to many of these issues. We all accept this situation is a total mess. The consequences are considerable, involving 315,000 people and going back to 1976. Some institutions are closed and no records exist. Besides the huge amount of money involved, this issue represents a mammoth task from an administrative and logistical point of view.

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