Mr. Tony O'Brien:

My view and the organisation's view on value for money is grounded on what it would typically cost to provide helpline services of this type - services we know were provided. Benchmarked against other activities, it was good value for money in the sense that we were getting a service, which we now know from information provided to us by the interim chief executive officer was costing Console more to provide than we were paying and, indeed, it will cost us more to provide the alternative service than we were paying to Console. That is a reasonable basis on which to say that we got value for money. As the Deputy said, there has never been a question mark around the quality of that service in recent times. In 2006, there were questions raised about the quality of the counselling supervision for that type of headline, which the organisation at that time addressed by bringing in a separate person as its chief executive officer, who remained there for two years. That is one of the reasons those issues were dealt with satisfactorily at that time.

This is a slightly different matter, though, from the broader issues within Console that have been uncovered by the internal audit, which go far beyond the resources provided by the HSE, but because of the relatively chaotic nature of the way matters were handled in that organisation, which led to its inability even to demonstrate to us at the time that it was spending more money providing services to us than we were giving it, it was impossible for the internal audit to audit everything in the organisation, which is what has given rise to all the information in the internal audit report.