Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

The cost of the e-Cabinet project, which was projected to cost €5 million up to the end of last year, was €3.489 million. Civil servants did most of the work on this as additional work, which they did extremely well and kept down the costs. All civil servants can link and feed in to the e-Cabinet system; it is not a system for only 15 of us, it is for the Civil Service to remove the paper mountains that have traditionally been used in the system. It is an effective system, with further enhancements which will be rolled out over the course of the year and next year.

Deputy Rabbitte said he is not clear about yesterday's decision. The Department of Finance has a list of Government guidelines to deal with all contracts. Accounting Officers should make sure those guidelines are correctly followed. In the normal course of events when consultants come into the Department they either do work or give advice. There is a distinction between these roles, sometimes they give advice on a short project, sometimes they come in physically to engage in a project as they did with the HSE.

The new set of controls the Government agreed yesterday was not cobbled together. It involved issues on which the centre for management, organisation and development, CMOD, in the Department of Finance had been engaged for some time.

The Department of Finance became concerned about the PPARS system when the HSE was set up. In the letter, which is in the public domain, and through other meetings it asked the HSE if it really knew where it was going, and was it moving on despite uncertainty about whether it could roll out the package to the entire health system. The Secretary General in the Department of Health and Children also raised the issue and asked for a review of the system over the summer. That is why the HSE was discussing the issue last Thursday.

The new set of controls agreed yesterday will ensure that major ICT projects in all areas are managed to best practice standards, namely, Government guidelines which the Department of Finance will consider again to see if there is anything missing. The new cross-departmental peer review process is being introduced with immediate effect to existing and new major projects.

The new system will comprise the most senior personnel with a track record of successful project management, both IT and other, of which we have several. In the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Social and Family Affairs, and the Department of Agriculture and Food, extremely successful schemes have been rolled out that do this country proud and are internationally recognised as top class systems.

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