Mr. Philip Nugent:

The basic point is that it does not call into question the validity of those consents.

The final piece in our transposition of the directive was the set of regulations that has been mentioned, which the Minister, Deputy Hogan, signed at the end of October. They literally and directly transposed all the wording of Article 3 and went a bit further. They were developed in consultation with the European Commission to ensure the commission was happy enough. The European Commission had referred Ireland for non-transposition. At this stage we are satisfied that we have to go no further to ensure absolute and proper transposition of Article 3.