Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

Contrary to what the Taoiseach says, last Tuesday he tried to defend this phenomenal waste. He also denied there was a problem. He instanced the e-Cabinet project as an area into which no consultants were brought and boasted that it cost only €5 million. How many people are involved in the e-Cabinet project, apart from the 15 computer geniuses present? Are there 100 people altogether? This project is intended to be great value for money to put the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Martin, on-line so that he does not read the document anyway.

There are two questions at issue: one, to use the dreadful phrase, is what happens "going forward", and the other is what action the Taoiseach will take as a result of what has been exposed? We rely entirely on the media to know what was decided at the Cabinet meeting yesterday. I am still not clear on this from the Taoiseach's remarks this morning. It has all the hallmarks of a solution cobbled together by some intelligent civil servant to get the Government over the hump of the single biggest scandalous waste in its seven years in Government.

What does the Taoiseach mean when he says there is to be a peer review of all IT contracts? The Tánaiste told us yesterday in the House that "there was no fixed price contract with the consultants. It appears that the more they worked, the more they got paid. There was no incentive in the contract for the consultants to deliver a particular project ". What kind of outside expertise will the Taoiseach bring in? According to The Irish Times this morning these people might be academics and other independent experts. Will they come in and work for nothing, given that we paid Deloitte & Touche €50 million for a botched job?

Will the Taoiseach take any action against those consultants? Will the State initiate legal action against the consultants who got away with €50 million of taxpayers' money to leave a mess behind, which the Tánaiste admitted did not deliver the project? We do not know if the Government is writing this off and putting it down to experience. Will legal action be initiated against the consultants and will the Taoiseach, as Head of Government, take any action against any of the three Ministers who left the taxpayers with this bill of €166 million?

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