Tom Kitt (Dublin South, Fianna Fail)

At that particular time, the commission had a sizeable budget, as the Deputy is aware. It had to use the funding to initiate many of the very good proposals that have now been realised. We have moved on. Technology moves on. There are so many new ways of dealing with issues with modern technology. That was an idea of its time which is, quite frankly, spent. We are now moving to a new action plan which we hope to launch in July and which will certainly take account of all of the advice we have been given.

As I said earlier, a detailed reply is a matter for the Minister for Finance but I will give a brief background to the REACH project. REACH was originally an agency of the Department of Social and Family Affairs. A decision was made to promote the use of the personal public service number, PPSN, and the public services card, PSC. In 2000, it was mandated to build a public service broker, PSB. The PSB consists of a number of components working together — information repositories, registration, transaction management facilities, a payment engine and a data vault. The information repositories were constructed in the form of Oasis, which is now Citizens Information, and was also built by Comhairle, and Basis for business, which was built by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

An important point is that much of the work and ideas that went into that are now being operated by line Departments. This goes back to my earlier point. A considerable amount of good work was done that is valuable so it is not a waste in that sense. Certainly, the payment——

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