Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is an opportunity for this directive to be added to or changed. That is what this debate is for and that is why we will have more hearings on it. We will have ample time to discuss it because it will not be completed under the current Presidency. We will have a chance to do more work on this and I have no problem with dealing with it again before Christmas and inviting the relevant stakeholders to a meeting. However, we cannot have a full investigation here and now or give our opinions on what went wrong. There is a certain, formal way of doing that. There is no problem with going further with this matter and we will have a chance to summarise our concerns and highlight what we would like to see added to the directive. That work is not for today, however.

I thank Mr. Pat Houlihan, Mr. John Moynihan and Ms Marie Dempsey for attending. We had a good start in terms of scrutinising this directive today but, as we have discovered, it was only a start. We will probably have three or four meetings on this and will invite the witnesses to appear before us again. I thank the witnesses for assisting us in teasing out the contents of the directive. This meeting has proved that it is a worthwhile exercise to go through some directives in detail. We will be in touch with the witnesses again and perhaps when they go through their own notes and review the transcript of today's meeting, they might make note of any questions that were not answered, with a view to answering them at a future meeting. Once again, many thanks.