Olwyn Enright (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

I thought that too but I tabled two oral questions to the Minister for Finance yesterday, neither of which appeared on the Order Paper and both of which were transferred to the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, which is why I am coming to the Taoiseach from whom I might get a direct answer. In terms of the flexibility within the Civil Service, it is worrying to hear the Taoiseach tell us that four years after the announcement there is a small group trying to explore how decentralisation of the semi-State bodies will happen. I would expect much more progress at this point and I ask him to give a specific answer in that regard.

On two further brief issues, is there a backlog in the Department of the Taoiseach and other Departments, such as in the Minister, Deputy Cullen's Department, in processing applications and other matters where staff encounter difficulty because people have been transferred?

It has been put to me by people involved in the proposed designation of a world heritage site in Clonmacnoise that one of the reasons for the lack of progress on this is that expertise in that regard has been transferred from the Department that was dealing with it to other Departments and that there is not significant expertise within the Department that should be dealing with the designation to progress this at the pace originally promised. Will the Taoiseach deal with that as well?

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