First, on Tuesday, the Enterprise and Culture Committee put the Scottish Enterprise chiefs through the wringer; my impression is that SE will think twice before they next seek to bounce the Executive into financing decisions. And both Scottish Enterprise and the Executive will have realised, perhaps for the first time, that there is a third party looking over their backs. The report in Wednesday's Scotsman is here.
Then yesterday the Justice 1 Committee began its investigation into the McKie affair and immediately pulled out information that the Executive would have no doubt preferred to remain hidden. The Scotsman notes:
"THE majority of experts at Scotland's largest fingerprint bureau still believe a fingerprint left at a murder scene belonged to former detective Shirley McKie, MSPs were told yesterday.
Ms McKie has always denied the print was hers and has conducted a nine-year battle to clear her name, winning a perjury case brought against her and securing £750,000 in compensation earlier this year after the Executive admitted an "honest mistake" had been made.
But yesterday Ewan Innes, the head of the Scottish Fingerprint Service, said that a majority of the staff in the service's Glasgow office - the largest in the country - still disputed Ms McKie's claims.
Mr Innes was appearing before the Justice 1 Committee's parliamentary inquiry into the McKie case which also heard that there was a culture at the fingerprint service of not admitting to mistakes."
No-one is saying that the Committee system is perfect - there are some MSPs who are obvious passengers and there are others pursuing political agenda. But it is just possible that at least some of the individual committees amount to something greater than the sum of their members. At the very least, the Holyrood committee system is far superior to the Westminster-based Scottish Affairs Committee, even before it became moribund with the advent of devolution.
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