Feargal Quinn (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The principal thing a business does if it has bad news is that it goes to its employees to convince them to take a pay cut or whatever. It also goes to its customers and apologises for putting the prices up. If the business can manage to find a way to do that and to get them on board, then it is able to continue. The same applies here. We must get the citizens of this country to understand exactly what we are doing, what we are spending and how it is being spent.

I said previously that there is a desperate need for a single public spending website. I raised this issue before but it did not get the air time I would have liked it to have received. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan, does not agree with it but it is related to transparency. It is the idea of having a single website where the taxpayer can see exactly where every cent and every euro spent by the Government goes. The Minister argued that this information is online. Some of it may well be but it is dispersed all over the place. If everything is so transparent, why must Deputies ask parliamentary questions about public expenditure as if we were back in the 1920s? They waste their time listening to answers to questions which have already been sent to them.