Mr. Tony O'Brien:

No official of the Department of Health would have had it within his or her authority to grant approval for an allowance outside the scale. The procedure is very clear; if such approval were to be sought, the Department would have needed the sanction of its Secretary General and possibly of its Minister too to make a business case to the then Department of Finance or the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. So it would have been documented. No official of the Department of Health would ever have believed that they had the authority to verbally sanction unsanctionable allowances. It is just not conceivable.