Apologies have been received from Deputy Bruton. The first item on the agenda is the draft minutes of the meeting of 22 June which have been circulated to committee members. Are they agreed? Agreed.
On correspondence, there is a matter to be addressed. I was to speak to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, to seek information on tax incentives but he was in China and only returned yesterday. I will speak to him in a few days and report back to the joint committee at its next meeting.
Does the Chairman talk to the Minister often?
Regularly. I come from County Laois, he comes from County Offaly and we meet in Portarlington.
As the Chairman and the Minister represent the same constituency, there might have been a problem.
We are one big happy family. We will finish dealing with correspondence and then have the discussion on the disabled drivers and passengers scheme.
The decision of the Sub-Committee on European Scrutiny at its meeting on 16 June was that no items needed to be referred for scrutiny. We have received a letter from the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority regarding the authority of the financial regulator. We have also received a letter from the Department of Finance concerning the ongoing review of certain tax reliefs which we will discuss following the discussion with the Minister for Finance.
In future we should ask those on the list of primary witnesses and their support personnel for a copy of any opening statement they will make 24 hours in advance of their appearing before the joint committee to allow members time to peruse them. We have not specified this until now.
When more members are present, we will discuss other correspondence received by the joint committee. Only a handful are present and I would prefer to wait until the spokespersons were present.
There is a vote in the Dáil. We will suspend the sitting and return as soon as possible for our discussion with representatives of the Department of Finance regarding the disabled drivers and passengers scheme.
