Noel Ahern (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)

These related, in the main, to administration and accountability issues. Under the current legislation, there is no provision for any explicit organisational structure, chief executive officer or executive accountability. Instead, the law provides that a part-time chairman providing a few hours' work a month on the dormant accounts should be accountable to the Committee of Public Accounts. Perhaps Members of both Houses slipped up when the original legislation was passed. We might have been carried away with the great idea and the benefits we could bestow without putting a structure in place, as is now clearly required. It is absolutely unfair and unrealistic to expect that a person who gives just a few hours a month to the board could be accountable for the spending of hundreds of millions of euro.

Section 36 of the Act allows the Minister to provide, on an ad hoc basis, some staff to the board to administer the spending of the dormant accounts fund. Currently, five staff are working in the dormant accounts secretariat. No one can reasonably expect this level of staff to administer a fund of the size now materialising.