Eoghan Murphy (Dublin South East, Fine Gael)

This is the sort of Bill that should be put to a free vote. I agree with that idea and I do not see a danger in doing that. The Government needs to loosen its grip on this Chamber, particularly in areas such as this where we agree with so much. I am a member of the Committee of Public Accounts and I very much support the thrust of this Bill. The committee investigates the spending of public money. That is its role, namely, to ascertain where that money is spent and if we are getting value for money on behalf of the taxpayers. Yet, when it comes to local authorities our role in that respect ends. That is not acceptable because it is public money, taxpayers' money. We as a public accounts committee should have the ability to see how that money is being spent.

A central element of Deputy McGuinness's Bill is section 2, which introduces a new section 5A, and I support that principle. Every year €5 billion of taxpayers' money goes form central government funding to local authorities and we cannot follow it. That is frustrating. One of the frustrating experiences I have had in the Dáil since I was elected was when I, together with other members of the Committee of Public Accounts, were investigating the spend of money on the Poolbeg incinerator. The Secretary General of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government came before the committee and Deputy McGuinness and I questioned her on how the money to date has been spent. It is more than €80 million and still nothing has been built. When we went through the rough breakdown we received from the Department - this was supplied to me by Councillor Paddy McCartan - we saw that the spend for client representative services was just under €26 million, for a category "other consultancy" it was just over €3 million, for legal fees it was just under €2 million, and for public relations it was just over €4 million. What has that money been spent on? What is the "other consultancy" on which €3.3 million was spent? What are the client representative services, at a cost of just under €26 million, and the public relations, at a cost of just over €4 million, for something that has not even been built? When we quizzed the Secretary General on how that money had been spent we got no answers.

A total of €43.7 million has been spent on land acquisition for the project and we heard that the compulsory purchase orders that were done in 2010 were put at 2007 prices. That is ridiculous and yet we still cannot investigate how that money was spent, why it was spent and whether we got value for money. As many people know, and as Deputy Kevin Humphreys and myself, who come from the constituency in which it was proposed to build this project, are aware, we are not getting value for money here but, more importantly, the Committee of Public Accounts cannot establish that. We have been told we will get a further breakdown of these figures but only after the final decision on this project has been made. That basically means when it is too late to determine this is bad money being spent on a bad project and when it is too late to stop further money being spent on what would be a failure and a catastrophe for the Dublin region and for the country. That is not acceptable.

We need to give the Committee of Public Accounts and the Comptroller and Auditor General more resources in order that we can investigate the spend of money on local authorities. If we are to give the Comptroller and Auditor General greater powers, we need to give that office greater resources. It has come up time and again on the Committee of Public Accounts that the Comptroller and Auditor General does not have sufficient resources to do its job, nor does the committee or us as Deputies.

People expect more from us as elected representatives. They expect more from their Dáil, committees and Government. We are in a time of crisis. We have much more work to do but we are doing it at a time when our resources and the money we can spend and the people we have working in government are reduced. That is creating difficulties and we are encountering those difficulties on a weekly basis at the Committee of Public Accounts. We need to make savings, there are huge savings to be made particularly in this House but are we making the correct savings? I am not sure that we are. Some of that needs to be looked at again in much more detail. We are spreading our resources too thin.

To take the example of Friday sittings, people complained that we were not sitting and doing enough and we decided that we would sit one extra day a month and now they are complaining that it costs too much. The Government needs to be above that kind of rubbish. I have had two Bills published and we have not had a chance to debate them because we only sit one Friday a month and only discuss one Bill. That needs to change as well. There is no reason we could not debate three Bills today. The Houses are open, people are working and the lights and heating are on. We could be in here doing much more work and being much more efficient in the use of the time we have here. That needs to change. I urge the Minister of State to discuss with her colleagues in Government and in Cabinet how we can further progress the reforms that have already been brought in by the Government. I welcome them but we need to go further. We need more reforms, to make ourselves more efficient and enable the new Deputies to do a better job. We were elected at a time of change and people expect more of us. We want to do more, yet we find it frustrating because there is not the time provided and there are not the required resources.

I very much welcome section 5. One suspects that certain Departments believe that if they simply ignore the members of the Committee of Public Accounts, we will go away, but we will not. Last October it was revealed that there is a €3.6 billion accounting error in the Department of Finance and the Committee of Public Accounts investigated it. We were promised two reports. We are now drawing towards the end of May and we have seen nothing. We need to introduce a measure in legislation that would see that not only are the Secretaries General of the various Departments compelled to report to the Committee of Public Accounts but that when it writes to a Department that its request is treated with the utmost importance and that the Department gets back to the committee, not in three or four months but ideally within a week or two and, if not, that it does so no later than 30 days. That is an important principle and I welcome that part of the Bill.

I commend Deputy McGuinness on bringing this Bill to the House. We have done a great deal of work to date on the Committee of Public Accounts and we have more to do. All we are asking for is the ability to do further work in the public interest, to ensure that the taxpayers' money that is being spent by the local authorities is being spent correctly and that we are getting value for money. That is not too much to ask. The Minister, Deputy Hogan, wants to bring in further reforms in this area and I welcome them but, unfortunately, I will not be supporting this Bill.

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