Liz McManus (Wicklow, Labour)

I have the highest regard for all Departments of the Civil Service, and I imagine the Minister's Department excels, but how did its financial management fail to keep pace with demand? We cannot have demand-led schemes in all areas, whose need we have to meet whatever the circumstances, and that is what financial management and forecasting is all about. Can the Minister explain how this went so badly wrong?

I am sorry to keep going but the Minister will answer at length and I have only one bite at the issue. Where is the funding the Minister promised for phase 2 of the greener homes scheme? I have added up the figures and cannot find the answer. A tiny portion remains unaccounted for but I assume that is not the amount to which the Minister refers because it would make no sense at all. He said the money in the greener homes scheme was to pay people who have already installed. That is not phase 1 but phase 2.

One can gloss over these issues or one can explore them. Money was allocated for the broadband programme to the tune of €10 million, which is big bucks. It was allocated for 2007 because broadband was an essential infrastructural requirement for modern Ireland. Why did it not go ahead? What went wrong so that this money can now be siphoned off to pay the bills run up by Sustainable Energy Ireland? I imagine the Comptroller and Auditor General will also have an interest in this but I would like to know.

The question I asked of the Minister is a political question, because it has nothing to do with managing the Department. Why was this issue not dealt with during the negotiations for Government? This is the bedrock of Green Party thinking and during those discussions it had all the resources of Departments, in particular the Department of Finance, to call on. Any Opposition politician tracking this would have known a problem was emerging so why was it not dealt with in those negotiations so that we would not be where we are today, stealing from one area of the Department to put into another as an exercise in crisis management?

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