Mr. Hamilton Goulding:

Yes. The next thing is the Conlan appointment. As I have said, in that case the board felt that of all the responsibilities, duties and obligations it had from a statutory point of view, the appointment of its chief executive was the most important - pretty well - decision that it would ever make. The CRC had had in its 63 years only four previous chief executives. They had all been spectacularly successful. The board felt this was really the most supremely important thing that it wanted to do independently. It was looking at sort of a conflict there between its statutory obligations to make an appointment and an agreement that I acknowledged to have had with the HSE to share in that process.

Yes, I am afraid I am putting my hands up here. We thought that of the two which one has supremacy and we actually delayed the decision for a long time. It was terribly important in our mind to get an excellent chief executive officer. We delayed the decision for a long time about how to go about it in relation to the HSE. In the end we decided that - to be honest, rightly or wrongly - there was a level of distrust of HSE administration. We thought it was an unwieldy and bureaucratic organisation. Specifically, we feared that if we involved it in this process - maybe I should not say that - we feared that it would cause first of all a delay, leaving us with a lame duck chief executive - Mr. Kiely having decided to go. Second, in the knowledge that the HSE had a lot of staff it wanted to redeploy, we actually feared that it might try to impose somebody on us. Rightly or wrongly, those were the kinds of views expressed. We boldly neglected the procedure that we-----