The Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, has issued a stern warning to Cabinet colleagues that they will have to be more accountable for how they spend public money.
In a blunt message delivered in the Dail yesterday he told Ministers not to come begging for top-up budgets next year, and signalled a new era of unprecedented examination of the way they operate their spending programmes. He made it clear that money alone was not the problem with the quality and quantity of public services.
"If it were, we would have solved all our problems by now. Greater attention needs to be devoted to securing value for money through more effective control and management of public expenditure," Mr McCreevy said.
Sources last night said the statement was aimed at high-spending Government departments which the Minister believes have not delivered value for money.
Starting next year, Mr McCreevy said he would be publishing yearly spending profiles of each Government department which would be available to members of the Dáil and commentators for scrutiny.
Opening a debate on the Estimates, Mr McCreevy called on each Minister to put aside a contingency amount within the 2003 allocation to cater for unforeseen spending emergencies.He said he was setting up a review of spending patterns over the past five years as part of the process of assessing the risk of future expenditure overruns on particular programmes. He said he would also require each Department to provide details of all capital projects which it proposed to initiate during 2003, and which are planned for the following four years.