Allen: Give watchdog power to bite

THE Public Accounts Committee has said if its powers are not beefed up it will become the watchdog that cannot bite as it tries to police those who waste taxpayers’ money.

Committee chairman Bernard Allen said the Government needed to give it new legal powers as a matter of urgency.

He said it was easy for people such Minister John Gormley to suggest the committee should probe the controversial dealings of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.

However, unless the Government legislates to remove data protection issues and gives it the power to demand evidence from witnesses, Mr Allen said its work will be “hampered and handicapped”.

“The committee is not going to get into charade,” he said.

Launching the Dáil Committee’s annual report, Mr Allen said if funding was available it would benefit from additional support staff. He said the committee will investigate the banking crisis later this year, but without powers of compellablity they felt unable to call the former financial regulator, Patrick Neary; the former governor of the Central Bank, John Hurley, and the former secretary general at the Department of Finance, David Doyle.

The annual report was particularly critical of the Department of Finance, which was “not fit for purpose”. This was because of a shortage of specialist skills and a failure to recruit qualified employees from outside the public sector.

Committee member Roisín Shortall said they had been told by the department they was a significant skills gap but recruitment figures showed it had not been able to remedy the situation.

In other sections, Mr Allen said the committee had concerns in relation to the spending habits in the public sector. He said they intend to publish a specific report on procurement practices this year with the help of external experts.

This will follow on from specific concerns arising from the contract entered into for Thornton Hall prison which rolled over to cost 30 times the original budget.

Mr Allen also said the committee would continue to more closely probe Government agencies, such as the Irish Prison Service.

They said in the case of HSE it had cited data protection laws, and a legal challenge from the Irish Hospital Consultants’ Association, as its reason for not disclosing information on consultants meeting contractual obligations to see public patients.

Mr Allen said the committee felt entitled to this information to see if consultants were seeing a sufficient percentage of public patients, as their new contracts stipulate.