Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Taoiseach's commitments to a greater level of transparency and accountability, although we can debate what led to them. Some of us feel that the scandal of the consultants at Irish Water is what forced his hand on this, but whatever the reason, we are moving on with the commitment from the Taoiseach to open things up and to have more information in the public domain and on his and other Departments' websites.

One of the issues that emerges from all of this, in the context of Irish Water and the recent discussions on the Estimates, which contain fairly significant sums for consultants, is that there is a gap in information concerning what is behind the headline payments to consultants. Let us take Irish Water as an example and the sum of €44 million-----

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