Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I presume I will be unable to convince Deputy Rabbitte one way or the other, but yesterday he said we were introducing a system of consultant upon consultant. Today I explained that is not what is envisaged. Rather, we use people with expertise, although Deputy Rabbitte uses the term "favoured businessperson". Were he not trying to argue a political point, the Deputy would see that the project will enhance the public service. The reason consultants are brought in is that sometimes Departments lack in-house expertise and skills, have insufficient resources to complete a task on time or need an independent and objective view.

In ICT and other projects in this country, there has unfortunately been a high failure rate. Plenty of figures have come into the public domain in that regard in the last few days. The OECD has issued many warnings regarding issues of public governance and leadership, failure to identify and manage skills, lack of skills to manage external providers and failure to involve end users.

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