Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I will come in first on the Deputy's initial points. Yes, we did significant work, but we did not do sufficient work in terms of looking in advance of actually engaging City of Dublin ETB to undertake the work. There was business process re-engineering work and we looked at student grants as one of the areas. We looked at possible business improvement techniques that could be undertaken. There was some work done but, unfortunately, with all of the cutbacks, that unit in the Department of Finance was actually closed down and its work diminished. There were difficulties and it was a very difficult time.

We did trial an online application facility with a number of the VECs, which was rolled out to 24 of them by the 2011-2012 academic year. That aspect was working well. Similarly, we trialled payment by electronic funds transfer but, when we were looking at what public body would undertake the process, we made the decision, building on the information we had, that they would look at having experience themselves or, talking to others with experience, that they would make a call to develop a proposal. That is why we worked it through with City of Dublin ETB. We would recognise that was deficient, and that is one of the lessons we have learned. We were overly optimistic about the potential for that to realise the scale of the system.

When we look at the different evaluations that have been undertaken, such as those by the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Centre for Effective Services, they identify that we did not put sufficient resources into the management of SUSI initially, into communicating with stakeholders about expectations. There was an expectation of a really effective service, but it was never the intention to be providing a perfect service in year one. It was very much building on the previous services that were in place.

As I have outlined already to Deputy Collins, we do think there will be significant cost savings over a number of years with a centralised system. There is a huge number of benefits in having standard application of processes and so on, in that we can be much more confident that decisions are being made in a consistent manner across all applications. We can also have much better management information to help decide and advise on possible changes in the future. We are confident that we are on the right track with this but we fully accept that there were deficiencies in the planning processes.