Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil leis an Aire mar go raibh sé sásta glacadh leis an díospóireacht seo. Ní raibh mé ag iarraidh díospóireachta chun gearán a dhéanamh, ach chun a mheabhrú do dhaoine nach bhfuil gach uile pháirtí ar Choimisiún Thithe an Oireachtais. The minutes of the commission are available online, but this does not take away from the fact quite a portion of Deputies are not represented on it, which means one is not represented in the day to day running of the House. This is a criticism I have repeated since the commission was established. We should try as much as possible, without making it unwieldy, for the commission to be fully reflective, so all of the parties in the House, and that includes staff, play a role in ensuring the services the Houses of the Oireachtas give us day in day out are the best possible services.

We are in a different era to 50 years ago. Much more is expected of us as parliamentarians than would have been expected even ten years ago. The access the public now has to Deputies and Senators is much faster and much more demanding than when I was first elected in 2002. When I was first elected the majority of my correspondence was through letters and now it is through e-mail. E-mail, and social media in particular, demand much quicker responses. They also demand us to be much more transparent and open in our activities. We are a window into the Irish Parliament for the world. This includes Ireland and elsewhere. When I go back to my office I might have a text message or an e-mail from an Irish citizen in some far-flung part of the world who might pass comment, as people often do. It might not be about me, it might be that the Dáil looked very grubby today. It can be this mundane. People look in and expect us as a Parliament to carry out our work as parliamentarians but also expect us to have the facilities.

There is a cost involved and there are people, in particular sometimes the media, who can be overly critical of the cost of democracy. They do not know it sometimes, but it does cost. We have a figure for an Estimate, part of which I presume will include, or if not will definitely include next year, the cost of securing the building. We were told almost ten years ago that in the morning this building could fall down around us. I do not think the general public internationally would want it to fall down, unless some of us were in it perhaps, as that is the way some people look at it. There is a cost involved. It is an old building and it will cost money to fix it to ensure we carry out the work people sent us here to do in the first place. People need to remember they sent us here. They have a choice every number of years to send us back.

It is a useful mechanism that once a year the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission puts forward its annual budget and that it gets a cursory debate at the very least because it is a big sum of money. People need to remember it covers the cost of more than 400 staff and 226 Deputies and Senators, and the running of an old building which is inefficient and everything else that goes with it. I congratulate the work everybody has done in recent times to cut costs such as electricity. We need to spend more on modernising our facilities to ensure we can capture the new world out there through social media. This is not a criticism of the Houses of the Oireachtas PR team which does a lot. We all do much but we can do a lot more. I am not opposed to the budget. It reflects where we are today. Last year's annual accounts showed we underspent what was allocated, which in some way sets the agenda. We need modernised facilities, so if something is starting to creak at the seams we need to fix it.

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