Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)

There are also bonuses. The bonus for the chief executive of Dublin Airport Authority in 2007 was €167,000. He also got fees of €17,000, pension contributions and other taxable benefits worth €181,000. My interest is not prurient in that we need to know what chief executives of State or semi-State companies are paid. I welcome the fact that we will. We need to know a lot more about the salaries. My interest is based on the lack of accountability of bodies under the remit of the Minister. Some are not accountable. Some companies do not report to the Comptroller and Auditor General, yet they spend an awful lot of money.

Very serious questions are being asked about what is going on in CIE. There are allegations of extremely serious fraud in the company, yet we received a letter today stating the auditors will not appear before the Joint Committee on Transport to be accountable for what is happening. The problem is that we are spending a fortune subsidising State and semi-State companies. They are not accountable at present in terms of their salaries and they remain unaccountable in terms of audits, reports of audits and secret audits that they will not tell us about but which show up abuse of public funds.

See this speech in context