During a second stage Seanad debate on the Ministers and Secretaries (Amendment) Bill 2012, I said: This is a very worthy Bill in terms of the whole objective of planning Government expenditure in advance and disclosing it. I think every business does something similar...

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.

We should include all public bodies in a simple easily accessible public spending website. This public spending website could be based on the American Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act 2006, introduced by President Obama when he was a Senator. This has led to the creation of website which lists any expenditure above $25,000 by the federal government and a number of states, although I am not sure how many.

It is completely open to the public. We have a lot of information online but it is not collected in one central website. I do not understand why we do not have one in a country of 4.5 million people. The state of Missouri in the US created a website showing how every $1 was spent in 2007. It cost approximately €150,000 for a state similar in the size to this country.

Here, some Government Departments are not giving a full breakdown of how their money was spent.

In the US, the Federal Government also published a vast array of data on data.gov. On recovery.gov, citizens can track how their stimulus funds were spent. Another website, foia.gov launched in March 2011, lets people see whether agencies are fufilling their obligations to disclose information under the Freedom of Information Act.

We should name and shame those parts of government which do not release information, especially related to finances, or do not release it in a timely manner.

I believe that instead of Deputies asking questions in the Dáil through the very old-fashioned system, and charade, of parliamentary questions, all spending could be put online on one single website for every Irish citizen to see.

The Minister, Deputy Howlin, says a lot of this information is online, but I dispute that because the facts and figures are simply not generally accessible to the general public and there is very little information. We do not have one simple website, and that is why politicians still have to ask questions and there is a scandal every week in newspapers about overspending, misspending or whatever in some Department, State, semi-State body or charity.

There must be a move away from the secrecy of the past. In an age of transparency, this is the sort of thing we should examine much more closely. We could have pie charts and bar charts, and we would be able to see exactly what type of Government expenditure is taking place. If we are serious about keeping track of Government expenditure limits the citizen must know exactly where his or her tax money is going.

For a full record of the debate, please click here.