Mr. Brendan Rogers:

We do not put money through government systems in Sierra Leone. We take the risk and make a decision where a country is not ready for that. I agree that when delegations from this committee travel to projects, they should not only see the good work but should look into some of the technical aspects of the audit and evaluation. A day should be set aside for that and Irish Aid should make a presentation on the issues before the delegation leaves Ireland and when it arrives in the country in question. We would welcome that as something new and important.

We keep in very close contact with the other donors and work closely with them. They work with their own headquarters, at their own pace and they have their own political systems to go through.

In terms of the timeframe, the Auditor General's report became available to the Government of Uganda on the evening of Thursday,18 October. The Auditor General called in the criminal intelligence directorate, CID, the head of police and a number of heads of departments and gave them the report. We received the report the next day, Friday, and were the only ones to receive it that day. We circulated it to the other donors over the weekend. We had the report over the weekend. I saw it on Tuesday, 23 October and we suspended our activities on Thursday, 25 October. We reacted almost immediately. We were in touch with our donor colleagues and we told them what we were going to do. We felt we had to tell them that. They were obviously having their own discussions. The other three are part of the Nordic group and wanted to issue a general statement with which they could all agree. We wanted to move quickly. We were lock-step, more or less, but we were certainly out front.

On the ground, our ambassador was co-ordinating with them and arranging a meeting with the Prime Minister. I went out with a very clear agenda, I am afraid. We worked with the other donors but we had an agenda which we wanted to get across very clearly, through the Tánaiste and the Minister of State, regarding the seriousness with which we regarded this issue. We are a good partner in Uganda. They regard us as a country that has stood by them, that has no colonial history in Africa and that is a good friend. To lose us as a friend is a major issue in Uganda. We have influence there. The Nordic donors are also considered to be very good friends of Uganda. I am not sure if they got a letter but we received a letter quite quickly. The Prime Minister announced a number of days ago that moneys would be restituted to all four donor countries. It is a lot of money for the Ugandan system to come up with.

The question was asked as to what we would do differently in the future. For a start, we must examine our risk profiling. Some of this is about political intelligence, judgment calls and analysing media. There were rumours in the media in July and August that there were problems in the Office of the Prime Minister, OPM. We do not fund the OPM, but other donors do. We fund through the Treasury, which is a system that is supposed to be ring-fenced. It was the fact that officials in the OPM extracted money that was not for the OPM which blind-sided us. There is always a lot of talk in the media but the question was whether the Auditor General could find any evidence of wrongdoing. He went in there in a very forensic fashion and extracted the evidence quickly and that is why we responded so quickly.

Mr. MacGabhannn will say a few words on the systems but we will also write to the Chairman and outline the systems, in writing, in the next few days.