Mr. Tony O'Brien:

If I may respond to that question, the Deputy is right to say that words like "governance" sound very grand. The reality of what was happening here was that a proportion of funding was put into a place where it was outside normal controls. Individuals and many of the officials that have been referred to would receive a phone call from the fund administrator offering them a trip. They would arrange to be away from their offices for the trip. They would turn up at the airport and the tickets would be there for them. Essentially, the failure was the capacity for a large amount of money to be taken outside of the normal control environment into an environment that appeared to be controlled because of the way the account was set up. I wish to clarify what I was indicating earlier was that I did not accept that there could have been nobody else in SIPTU, apart from the fund administrator, aware of this, but I was not questioning the corporate position of SIPTU, that it did not have control of the account. The problem is that the appearance would have been created that it was official and that it was some control environment. The important thing is that now the way in which any grant funds are processed precludes the possibility of them going off into this parallel universe.