Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

——for several minutes before eventually being sent full circle.

The alternative is to look up the website. Incidentally, the Taoiseach has not answered this part of the question either. The idea was there would be a single website containing all public service information. It was to have been a one-stop shop, at which those who wished to get information about public services could access a particular website that would be able to navigate and get the information required. Moreover, if one needed to go from one Department to another or from one service to another, one could do that.

There was an attempt made to establish such a website at very considerable cost to the public — we are now told €40 million. However, it took so long and it cost so much, and it eventually duplicated some of the things that were there already, that the Comptroller and Auditor General issued a report on it last year and now it is closed down. If the Government cannot establish a website describing the way in which public services are integrated, what confidence do we have that it will be able to integrate the services themselves?

The public does not need to hear a litany of what the process involves, this task force and that task force or this study and that study, and new working groups and new action groups etc. The public needs to see tangible results, something to which one can point that a particular service either is improved or will be improved in six months' time as a result of all of these initiatives of which we hear so much.

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