I thank the Tánaiste. We move now to Aontú and Deputy Tóibín.

The Tánaiste says there should not be a consequence-free zone. This Government is a consequence-free zone. This Government is an accountability-free zone when it comes to waste. You speak about the Arts Council IT waste as some kind of shock, as if you are a passenger on the ship of State.

You are at the helm of the ship of State in the context of these issues.

I could spend the full day here giving a litany of Government projects in respect of which there has been waste, week after week, in the past four or five years. There is deep frustration among taxpayers at the level of Government waste. The Arts Council incinerated €7 million of State funding. We have nothing to show for that. What we have is a Government - the same Government that was in place a few weeks ago - shrugging its shoulders and saying it does not know what happened. That is an incredible answer for any Government to give.

I honestly believe that there is a culture of waste that is coming from the top. One of the pivotal issues of the general election campaign was the Tánaiste stating that he did not sign the contract for the national children's hospital. This culture of evasion, dodging, delaying and obfuscating is coming from the top and is seeping into every level of the senior Civil Service.

Let us look at the number of people who are involved. We had a senior Minister. Where was the oversight? We had junior Ministers. Where was the oversight? We had Secretaries General. Where was the oversight? We had directors and chairs of the Arts Council. Where was the oversight? We had an audit committee in the Arts Council. Where was the oversight? We have loads of people who are getting massive wages to oversee the spending of State money - citizens' money - and nobody is doing their job. Week after week, people are cursed to wake up to the next instalment of Government waste. People have had enough of this. People make jokes about the bicycle shed and the wall around the WRC. It is not a joke. What is happening to taxpayers' money is disgusting, and we cannot tolerate it any further.

We in Aontú have stated that it should be written into the contracts of senior civil servants that they have a responsibility to mind taxpayers' money. We have stated that there should be a junior Minister in the Department of the Taoiseach to report on live contracts to make sure they are not going over budget or over time in terms of delivery and that this person should report to the Taoiseach on a weekly basis in order that there would be full oversight of what is happening. Of course, this has not been done. We have stated very clearly that there has to be a cost to senior civil servants in terms of this waste. That cost should be up to including the loss of a person's job. If there is no cost involved, there will be no change and we will be talking about this forever.

Certainly, nobody on this side of the House in any way laughs about such matters. The Deputy is entirely correct. They are extraordinarily serious matters. Men and women get up every morning, go to work, do a hard day's work and pay their taxes, and they want to see those taxes spent well to deliver for them and their families and communities.

It is also fair to say, however, that Government can only be accountable for what it is told. If there are officials in State agencies or others who are pursuing a project that does not adhere to the public spending code, that is not a small matter and it cannot and will not be a consequence-free zone. Let us be very clear. There are very serious consequences for politicians. We have a thing called an election. We put our name on a ballot paper and people in our communities go out and choose to vote or not vote for us. Everyone in here, including the Deputy, receives a mandate. People are getting a bit sick and tired, to put it mildly, of public money not being spent adequately and, as in this case, there being nothing to show for it. The Deputy is right about that. They are also tired of finding that there are individuals who are often somewhat anonymous when it comes to these issues.

Let us be clear - I am very clear on this too - that people can make mistakes. We do not want a culture where people are risk averse. People are going to say "That's different". It is absolutely different; but when a mistake is made, you have to engage. This was not an example of that. In my view, this was a very clear and flagrant breach of the public spending code.

I want to balance my comments by saying that in Ireland we do deliver an awful lot of projects very well. Our public servants deliver a lot of projects well, on budget, on time and even ahead of time and ahead of budget on occasion. The Deputy says he can list many projects. I can also list many projects that were delivered on budget and on time, be it the Moycullen bypass, the Dunkettle interchange or the Listowel bypass, to name just some in recent times. Other examples include new school extensions, new primary care centres, major hospital extensions like that relating to the Mater Hospital and St. Luke's Hospital in Kilkenny and the national broadband plan, which is the modern equivalent of rural electrification and which is on budget and ahead of schedule.

The Deputy is quite right. Today, we should be talking about the issue relating to the Arts Council. I do not dispute that, but we also deliver very many projects across the public service on time and on budget. I say this to be balanced in my comments. What has happened in the Arts Council is a cause of serious concern, however. What concerns me, as Tánaiste and as a coalition leader, is the question of whether it is confined just to this project and how we can have confidence in the overall governance structure and systems within the Arts Council and, as Deputy Bacik rightly identified, in departmental oversight of agencies. The responsible thing to do here is exactly what the Minister, Deputy O'Donovan, proposed to Cabinet, namely establishing in the coming week an external review to get to the bottom of these matters and to report and for the Committee of Public Accounts and others to have an opportunity to examine this issue.

There is a policy sometimes on the part of senior Ministers to hear no evil and see no evil and to say "Oh, we didn't know what was happening." The Tánaiste mentioned that before. It is the responsibility of a Minister to know what is happening in his or her Department. You cannot insulate yourself from crises such as this by pleading ignorance over and over again. That is not an excuse when it comes to waste.

We do not even have the opportunity to bring the former Minister, Catherine Martin, before a committee of the Oireachtas because 11 weeks after the election, there are no committees. I understand it is unlikely that there will be any committees for a number of weeks, which, again, shows us the dysfunction of and the glacial pace of accountability within the system.

This is not a victimless crime. When you burn through so much money, there is a cost. The amount involved would have paid for 25 homes and we could have put 75 people into those homes. It would have paid for 600 scoliosis operations. It would have paid for six CAMHS teams around the country. Not only is the Government burning up taxpayers' money, it is taking away that critically needed cash from the people who need it most.

I accept the Deputy's passion on this matter. Perhaps I speak in a calmer tone than he does on occasion, but I ask that he please not misunderstand that. There is absolute fury on Government benches in respect of this situation. The people we represent - the people who voted for us and the mandates we have received - are extraordinarily annoyed about this matter. The Deputy is right. Almost €7 million of taxpayers' money that was given to the Arts Council has been wasted, with nothing to show for it. As deputy head of this Government, I am saying to the Deputy with absolute clarity that there will be consequences for that. We will establish what happened. We will have an external review and the Government will then decide how to act.

It will move on. Nobody will lose their job.

That is what a responsible Government does. A responsible Government also garners the facts. Let us do that. We do not need faux outrage. What we need are the facts. Gather the facts and then Government will make a proper determination when it has the information. That is what some of the Deputy's colleagues on the Opposition benches have rightly called for. We need to go through this by means of an external review. We will get to the bottom of this. Breaching the public sector spending code is not consequence free.