Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

The Deputy makes a valid point. We must examine all these organisations. I was looking at the full functioning of the council and it has an important function. It appoints the Financial Services Ombudsman and his deputy. We will look at that in due course when the committee is up and running to see what each of the bodies created in the past does, if it is still fit purpose, whether there are economies we can make or mergers we can operate or whether the body can be subsumed back into a Department. There was a tendency in the last decade, whenever a function appeared on the horizon, to create a new agency to carry it out.

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