Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I would appreciate if the witnesses could come back to the committee with that information, please.

On the protected disclosures, we have some correspondence in from the Department today indicating that there were two protected disclosures. One was where an investigation was done by the legal firm McCann Fitzgerald and the second one was carried out by RSM Ireland Forensic and Investigation Services. There were ten such disclosures in 2022, with very small numbers of such disclosures prior to that. That was a year where many issues seem to have come to light which certainly go to the heart of how the organisation was governed, including the board.

Looking at this reply from the Department, it looks like the Department outsourced the inquiry, which is not unusual, into the protected disclosures. The protected disclosure process is very useful because it can lead to very important reforms as inside information is needed to address issues. It looks, however, like the Department has outsourced the disclosures but does not know what is going on with the first disclosure. On the second disclosure, it seems that the report is more or less completed but the Department does not seem to have been briefed. This has all of the feeling of a damage limitation exercise, given how unsatisfactory the Department’s last appearance before this committee was. Here we go again, where these things have not been brought to a conclusion where we can actually see the outworkings. Can the Department elaborate on this further on just exactly the amount of information it has on these investigations or is this exercise totally outsourced?