Dr. Mary Murphy:

I suppose we answer it by saying we are growing the IHREC and have the capacity to grow. It would depend on whether the work referred to by the Deputy would take precedence over other priority areas of work that we could do. That, in turn, would depend to some degree on how our role developed as these institutional spaces emerged. It is a question of the spaces and roles in which we find ourselves getting involved. We have spoken about the various potential roles the IHREC could play, including encouraging, enabling, compliance and quality control roles. We are probably not going to do all of those things. It will depend on the degree to which we can deliver in the roles we decide to adopt by buying in capacity - the ESRI does this, as the Deputy said - or growing in-house capacity. Obviously, it will be a mixture of the two. One of the reasons we quickly decided to bring together a group of independent actors and experts from those easily available to us in the English-speaking world was we saw a short-term need to buy in specific expertise and capacity. We are putting in place arrangements to ensure we can easily call in such expertise in a fluid manner.