Mr. Paul Kenny:

The initial decision was taken in early 2013 but there was a question over who would run with the legislation because there are two Departments involved. We operate under the Department of Social Protection and the Department of Finance is responsible for the Financial Services Ombudsman. Its legislation is part of the Central Bank legislation and, quite honestly, it is more complicated than ours which is shorter and much simpler than the legislation which governs the Financial Services Ombudsman. We will have to retain certain differences even after the merger is complete because we can look back much further than is possible under the ordinary law of contract which governs most of the activity of the Financial Services Ombudsman.

A steering group has met. We are currently actively working and have split into sub-groups. The Departments of Finance, Social Protection and Public Expenditure and Reform and the two ombudsman offices are doing other work together. We are trying to expedite this because my last contract expires in mid-2015. The current contract of the Financial Services Ombudsman expires, I understand, even earlier. There is now an urgency about it.

Progress is being made, and we are very pleased with how easily that progress has been achieved so far. Nobody has been dragged kicking and screaming from the room in protest about what is happening. We are all very happy to try to make this work, but my concern is that we have lost a number of staff during the period of uncertainty, because this uncertainty has been going on since Colm McCarthy first mentioned it way back and it has been hanging over our heads since then. If anybody got a chance of getting promotion elsewhere, they probably took it, and we lost a number of people whom we have not been able to replace.