John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

First, I commend both committees of the House on the manner in which they have conducted the meetings to date. I wish to support the Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts, Deputy Stanley, in his request today regarding those who should appear before the committee and regarding the paperwork he has requested. Moreover, the powers given to the Committee of Public Accounts need to ensure that it has compellability and that the committee has the right to send for persons and papers, as is the case with an investigation by the Comptroller and Auditor General.

I also would like to know why the Comptroller and Auditor General has not been involved in this. The Government could have given full powers to the Comptroller and Auditor General to carry out the respective analysis of the taxpayers' money that went into RTÉ. I have asked umpteen times for the powers of the Committee of Public Accounts to be extended to local government and to the examination of any taxpayers' money that has been allocated to an agency, where it needs to be investigated. Over the past ten years, every Government has failed to grasp the issue of audit. If we go back to the banking collapse and the financial crisis, the auditors said that the banks were okay; they were solvent. Two days later, we were all gone bust. Those same auditors are now being asked to look at RTÉ. Did we learn anything at all from them?. No, we did not. We should be looking outside the State for auditors who are not compromised in any way and who understand the role of governance. We need to have governance as a rules-based approach. Until we make these changes, we are going to have these crises and not just in RTÉ. We have already had a crisis in An Garda Síochána, in Horse Sport Ireland and local government and nothing has been learned. I ask that all of the paperwork, including the contract with Renault, be made available openly. Let us see what is going on in RTÉ and let us respond accordingly.

What happened in the audit committee? Why did no auditor or accountant pick this up over a period of, say, ten years? It was never picked up, nobody saw anything. The audit committee and the Government over those years have failed and we need to do something extraordinary to rescue the reputation of RTÉ. We need to put in place mechanisms that will protect the workers and will ensure that any hard-nosed agent acting on behalf of anyone working with RTÉ is held to account. The question arising from that is, when did the negotiations take place. Who signed off on the agreement? Who signed off on the payments?

To go back to the valuable work done by the Committee of Public Accounts, it was like extracting teeth listening to that committee meeting. That shows how deep the culture is in RTÉ of avoiding all of the questions. The transparency that all of us are asking for is not present in those hearings. This tells me there is a huge issue beyond just this matter. We can look at Ryan Tubridy or any of the rest of them but what we should be looking at is who did the deal and what happened on the RTÉ side. That is our job here. Corruption starts at the top and we need to look at the possibilities of all of that, right down through the organisation. To the Minister, who sits at Cabinet, I say there is an urgent need to look at the reform of the Committee of Public Accounts, the extension of its powers and of the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General. It has been avoided for years and years. As long as that continues, the message going out from the Government is lip service being paid to governance and transparency. This will blow over, like many other issues that have faced organisations in the State. The politics of it will be dealt with. We had this grand debate. I must leave four minutes for my colleague here, which I will do, but is it not another disgrace that backbenchers are limited to that four minutes? We cannot fully flesh out the issues that we might know about. By restricting the Opposition parties and backbenchers, the Government is now avoiding the issue by limiting the debate and that just adds further to the scandal. I ask the Minister to insist that the questions are answered and to insist that Deputy Stanley and the other committee are duly supported and to insist on honesty and truth, because we are not getting it.

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