Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I am not convinced that we should have stopped. It is very easy in retrospect to decide that we should have stopped. While we did not have a benchmark against which to measure service performance in 2012 and 2013, we had a benchmark against which to measure performance in January 2013, which was slightly ahead of the combination of all of the VECs and local authorities at the time. We know what the performance was during September, October and November, while not knowing the baseline before then. The group involved would have been the people involved in the planning groups and we have been asking the question, as the Chairman has asked, whether we should have stopped and delayed by one year. However, we must consider the context of the time and the demand to save resources and reduce numbers in the public service. We needed to put a shared service in place with the aim of bringing that about. Therefore, the option of delaying by one year was not considered.