Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

Deputy Dowds asked me a question that I have not answered yet and I will answer now if he would like. It was about the process we went through to decide on going with the City of Dublin Education and Training Board. We put in place a selection panel in November 2010 to agree procedures and carry out the selection process to identify a suitable public body. The members of the selection panel, of whose names I have a note, were Pat McLoughlin, who was the chief executive of Irish Payment Services Organisation, Jim Duffy, a former assistant secretary in the Department of Finance with the responsibility the Centre for Management and Organisation Development, CMOD, Gerry Kearney, a former Secretary General in the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs with significant experience in programme management, and also an assistant secretary in the Revenue Commissioners. They were chosen by reference to their knowledge and their significant experience in the various elements.

In January 2011, we issued an expressions of interest invitation and we offered it to vocational education committees, VECs, local authorities an other public bodies. We had got legal advice when the relevant legislation was under consideration that we could not legislate to outsource it completely and, therefore, we had to do this through a public body, but the public body could outsource elements of it. We received ten proposals. We looked at those proposals and they were evaluated against a number of headings - organisational capacity to perform the function, experience in dealing with comparable schemes and services, existing core management expertise and resources available to be deployed to the function, capacity to deliver strong cost and efficiency benefits, and overall quality of the proposal for delivery of a central student grants function. On the basis of the review by the independent selection panel at the initial stage of the expressions of interest, four of the ten proposals were shortlisted for oral presentation. There was a question and answer session at the oral presentation and then they were assigned a ranking based on the relative strengths arising from that. The City of Dublin VEC came through that process ahead of the three others, which were Pobal, Waterford County and City Councils and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. They were assessed as being the best in the each of the five categories for that.