Mr. Simon O'Brien:

I fully informed the Minister of everything that had happened regarding this particular incident and investigation. I was with the Minister and his officials for two hours and we had a very fruitful discussion. I made it clear to the Minister that everything we have done, in terms of the activities of myself and my colleagues, was done in the best of faith. We believed that with the level of suspicion and threat involved, we had to move the issue on. We opened the investigation in October and by December I had the closing report. We were very clear that this needed to be a short, sharp look at the potential threats ranged against us. We had to identify those threats and see if we could give them any provenance, namely, find out where they were coming from. If we could not do that and find evidence of an offence, we would close the investigation down and we did that very quickly.