Mr. David Cooney:

Absolutely. I will put my hand up and accept my share of responsibility for that. I accept the report. There was a failure by the embassy to track this money. That should have been done. I acknowledge the staff weaknesses that were pointed out. As I said earlier, one thing worse than having a fraud is not following up properly on it. The report from the evaluation and audit unit will be followed up. We have learned lessons from it, particularly as to how we prepare our staff. Our staff, when they go abroad to take up positions as head of mission, should be better prepared and trained in financial management. There needs to be a proper handover. As regards the auditor, it was a problem that the internal auditor was on maternity leave. Anyone who has worked in a business knows that maternity leave is a fact of life that one must deal with when it happens. We did bring in an interim auditor but that person did not have the same knowledge of the programme as the full-time auditor. There is not too much of a way around it, but there were issues on the staffing side that we must address. I do not dispute any of these reports. There were failings. In some cases it could have been individual failings. In other cases it could be the system failing in that people were not properly prepared.

We have sent out a very thorough letter and have received reports from all our ambassadors. We will be looking at this extremely thoroughly. We do not take this lightly. We have enormous pride in our programme. I know everybody involved in Irish Aid feels mugged by what has happened. We are determined that it will not happen again. If we contributed to this in any way, which we clearly have in certain small aspects, we are determined to ensure that it will not happen again.

As regards personal responsibility, my major concern about dealing with fraud is that we can deal with it properly and that people can deal with it openly. My greatest fear is that the natural human instinct, to cover up to protect the programme, would happen, which would be a disaster. I want to have a system in which people can own up to something wrong without thinking they will be sacked or whether the Secretary General will be fried by the Committee of Public Accounts. Unless there has been dishonesty or corruption in our system or a complete failure of responsibility, we must be able to face up to shortcomings and deal with them. I do not want people to be going about in fear if they discover a mistake or believing, if they discover they screwed up on something, that they must try to cover it up. I want them to know that these things can be dealt with in a mature and responsible way. The most important thing is to get on top of what happened and ensure it does not happen again.

There were shortcomings in the embassy in Uganda. They were identified by the evaluation and audit unit. My job is to ensure that those shortcoming are rectified and they do not exist elsewhere in the system. I am determined to do that.