Mr. Rob Morrison:

We came up with conclusions to the editorial review after what Mr. Carson has described as an in-depth research period and a substantial investigation, and we made a number of recommendations to RTE to address the issues and to prevent it happening again in similar programmes in the future. The headline findings were largely to do with the origination of the questions and the make up of the audience. That was where most of the problems lay.

There were a number of questions around the derivation of the questions and the balance to those asked of the candidates in the programme. The most serious omission from the questions was, once the team had decided they would ask each member of the panel at least one challenging question, for some reason, no direct challenging question was asked of Michael D. Higgins from the audience.

We found a number of things about which we are unhappy. First, the format of the programme was very confused and much too complicated. They had what we call a roadmap of questions. Normally, for a programme of that length, there might be ten or 12 questions in the roadmap but this had up to 50 questions. The situation was, therefore, very confused on the night. It was not helped by the worst weather in living memory and when it came to it-----