Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----and are delivering vital health services which, frankly, were never delivered by the State. If they were not there, God knows in what type of situation vulnerable people in this country would have found themselves. What we must do is weed out the bad apples. We must find the people who are not living within the rules. That is the reason we have an annual compliance statement. What is particularly upsetting and disturbing is that people in some cases are signing on the dotted line to say they are in compliance and that they are living within the pay structures, when they simply are not. That is the purpose of the external review and the internal audit. It is the reason for sending the internal audits to the Comptroller and Auditor General.

On the question about pro tem, I have examined this and I do not believe it works. The reason is that when I was a member of the Committee of Public Accounts, we had representatives of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, DDDA, appear before the committee to discuss that debacle. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government had a representative on the board of the DDDA. The committee also had representatives of the Red Cross appear before it. The Department of Defence had a representative on the board of the Red Cross. The issue is that roles and responsibilities got extraordinarily confused. I believe there are inadvertent consequences. Who is the person responsible to - the board or the HSE? I prefer to beef up these controls first.

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