Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The business plan of any organisation is an internally focused executive document. In effect, it is an operational plan for a given period. It may contain commercially and operationally sensitive information. As such, it would not be appropriate to place it in the public domain. The IAA will be subject to a range of accountability mechanisms provided for in the Bill and existing legislation. Such mechanisms include the laying of the statement of strategy and the annual report and financial statements before the Houses of the Oireachtas and the requirement under section 77 of the Bill that the chief executive or a relevant officer shall account for the performance of the company’s functions to a committee of one or both Houses. As such, I cannot accept amendment No. 3c.

Section 67 provides that the IAA will submit to the Minister an annual report on its performance in regulating aviation safety. It sets out that the report will include planned activity for the coming year and a review of the past year’s activity. This section requires that the Minister must, within one month after receiving an aviation safety performance statement from the IAA, lay it before each House of the Oireachtas. Amendments Nos. 3gand 3heffectively require that the report be submitted to the Minister and the Houses simultaneously. Given the requirement for the Minister to lay the report before the Houses within one month of receipt, these amendments result in an unnecessary bypassing of the normal process of a Minister seeking briefings and clarifications from the State body for which he or she holds policy and corporate governance responsibility before the report enters the public domain. As such, I cannot accept amendments Nos. 3gand 3h.