Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

The committee meets on a monthly basis. I do not know if this is helpful to Deputies, but if direct questions are posed about any of these issues, the Ministers who report to the committee would be only too glad to answer them. When I was on the other side of the House and Deputy Rabbitte was on this side, he used to take part of the time allocated to Taoiseach's questions to answer these types of questions and I posed questions directly to him. Unfortunately, that does not happen now and if Deputies really want answers, they should revert to the old system, which worked very well.

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