Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I have tabled this matter because the work of the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service is most valuable. It is an essential part of the work being done by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, and the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Deputy Harris. It is the expenditure equivalent of the work the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council does on the tax side. It is vital that public money is not spent on expenditures that are ineffective and that do not create a flow of benefits that exceed the costs and it is not desirable to have expenditures which add to the national debt problem. The Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service has a seven-member oversight committee and I commend them. They include Professors Dave Madden and Kevin Denny of UCD, as well as Professor Frances Ruane. The chair is Ms Deirdre Hanlon, assistant secretary at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. There also is a 15-member management group. They have a strong view that the service needs to extend its work to include the Departments of Education and Skills and Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and they want those Departments to join in the Government Economic and Evaluation Service by the end of 2015. I would say, "Why not today?" That is approximately €9 billion of expenditure, out of €53 billion overall or 18%, that is not covered by this valuable work that we all must do. The first set of graduates recruited will have joined by the first quarter of this year. They have masters degrees and the object is a programme of continuous professional development to assist both the Government and the Oireachtas in providing an evaluation service.

The constitutional officer to oversee value for money is the Comptroller and Auditor General and perhaps this new body should liaise with him because sometimes the Comptroller and Auditor General only turns up after the mishap has happened. Members need to have early warnings, as events such as the banking crisis illustrate for them. Moreover, there are parallels, such as the Congressional Budget Office in the United States and so on. The problem with this evaluation exercise is it undoubtedly will have powerful enemies. Lobby groups, not just bankers, think they have the right to Exchequer funds, notoriously on 29 September 2008. There are also enemies within as described in the work of the US economist, William Niskanen, whereby in many bureaucracies, promotion depends on expanding the budget and therefore, they maximise the budget rather than even asking the question as to whether those budgets led to any useful outputs. More cost-benefit analyses and more studies are needed in advance.

There have been three cases of late about which I am worried. A single page was all that appeared in the Oireachtas Library about the sale of Aer Lingus. While I expressed strong views on the other point of view regarding the sale of the Government's stake, this is inadequate. In addition, I raised at the relevant Oireachtas committee last week the issue of postcodes, involving €27 million for a seven-digit non-sequential address for every house in the country but I note the time the President had to consider such a proposal, on which I have seen no cost-benefit analysis, was reduced when the Government invoked Article 25.2 2° of the Constitution to require that legislation to be signed on a date earlier than the fifth day after the Bill was presented to the President.

The third case that has arisen in the transport committee, which I believe also affects the Minister of State's part of the country and it concerns the question of whether it is the correct solution to generate electricity for Northern Ireland within that territory, for example, in Derry or in Larne or is it correct to generate it in the South? How much does one lose if the transmission is overhead on pylons or underground? I believe that numbers in this regard would help.

This is a message that is of use to evaluation. We should have a lot more of it as it is valuable and this House will always support progress towards better evaluation of public expenditure. All knowledge that can help the better governance of Ireland should be promoted. Moves in that regard would certainly would have the support of this House. This is why I asked for this item to be considered. The initiative is important, will have powerful enemies and people will try to avoid it but it is in the interests of Parliament and, as the Government has stated, it is in its own interest to have full evaluations and full discussion. The recruitment of all these young people with those qualifications and the involvement of the senior academics is most welcome and I wish the initiative well.