John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In the course of our questions here, I challenged Mr. Boland about his opening statement. Unfortunately, I did not call first on Deputy Donohue because I was shocked by it not addressing the issues. I based the questions in my contribution on the information that we had at that time. We were not aware of the statement that Mr. Boland then read out; nobody was. The other matter of which we were not aware - we must be balanced here in regard to Professor Byrne - was the invoices and the press statement from a press release of last week, which were presented to the committee following a request from Deputies Donohue and O'Donnell. It would have helped us in how we framed our questions, and might have taken some of the frustration and anger out of the exchanges and the debate, had we been told, as the press release indicates, that the then chairman, Mr. Redmond O'Donoghue, had authorised and, indeed, organised the trips at the time. That, to me, is significant information because up to now we were talking about the spend from the president's office and how he conducted the business at WIT. It needs to be put on record that in this particular statement there is significant information which shows that the expenditure on this item was not only at the whim of the president and was not only something that was being done, but was authorised and organised by the chairman. That is what the statement says. I have just had time to look at it and read it.

The second matter I want to clarify is that during the course of the exchange I asked the clerk to the committee to double-check on the e-mails that would have come in to the committee. Earlier, we stated that we received no indication from the president, Dr. Ruaidhrí Neavyn as to what was going on or what we were to be informed of.