Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I acknowledge the assistance of the Comptroller and Auditor General in our final decision-making approach on initiating this. I also acknowledge the impact of the Committee of Public Accounts considerations on that decision. Following our last appearance at the committee, when the issue of the companies was addressed and while we were already in detailed engagement with the HEA and WIT, we met with the current chairperson and the current president. Arising from that meeting and the manner in which WIT did not have access to full information, we felt we needed to initiate an inspection. We did so in the context of trying to protect the academic reputation of WIT. As the president said, we were extremely conscious of it. The inspection process was helpful and it has given us real confidence about the information we needed on what was happening in WIT. We all learned a lot. I am not trying to avoid Deputy Deasy's question and I will come to it in a second. We have a way forward on the report that we find very helpful. It involves an additional investment from the State, which will be repaid. We were being asked to make a call about paying it without enough information. We now have that call and, most importantly, the companies are being restructured and coming into the ownership of WIT.

The report also identified a number of governance changes. WIT has bought into that and we are glad that it has done so. It will take some time to implement. The Department and the HEA have notified WIT that, in an unusual step and in a non-statutory way, on completion of the work within WIT we will have a further expert or group of experts to check on the company issues and the governance issues. It is an external check on behalf of the Department and will also assist WIT on these procedures. We are seeking to put in place something as close as we can get to a guarantee about its effectiveness. In no way are we questioning the appropriateness of WIT to undertake the changes. However, given the importance of the issues and the need to ensure they are sorted out, we thought we should do so.

With regard to the history of the companies, the Department had a number of concerns about the relationship with the companies in the late 1990s and in the early part of last decade, in 2001. We had a good bit of dialogue with WIT around some of the issues. In particular, there were concerns of the student union, which were addressed by WIT. The other issues were perceived to be not as important and they were not followed up sufficiently by us and WIT. WIT assured us they were separate companies and they continued not to be included in the accounts. We recognise that we did not follow up sufficiently in regard to those issues. The fact that we did not follow up on these issues led to the continuing uncertainty. From the Quigley report, we can see that this uncertainty increased in the past decade. A number of issues arose in the report and at times they were treated as if they were separate companies while at other times they were treated like companies of the institute.