Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

——or looking at the television. It is about a communications unit in the Department of the Taoiseach communicating with the existing press offices, which are part of every Department of State and are necessary in the modern age. Given the number of outlets and queries, one could not provide an efficient service if one did not have some dedicated staff for that purpose and they are kept very busy. Quite apart from efforts that might be made by Ministers to communicate what they are doing or by Departments to communicate decisions, public policy issues or issues of important public information, the traffic coming from outside into the Departments, involving queries on this, that and the other, on each and every issue that may be relevant, irrelevant or even non-existent, that must be chased up to satisfy the insatiable appetite of some media outlets requires people to be available to do that work. Some of it is productive and one would hope that somewhat fewer queries would arise, but that is the modern world in which we live. To have only one communications unit for the entire Government would be an inefficient way of dealing with the situation.

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