Dr. Meta Osborne:

I wish to add to this. There are two parts. I was asked when I was asked to attend the meeting of the appointments and remuneration committee. I was actually appointed to it in January and it did not meet until April. There was the usual notification that a meeting was to take place. At the committee meeting, we eventually got around to discussing the reappointment of Mr. Brian Kavanagh. Something that came out of that process was that we needed a succession plan for the future. When we came to the board with the recommendation that Mr. Brian Kavanagh should be reappointed, one of the very useful points that emerged from the discussions was that we should set up a special committee to examine that particular issue. That is what we did. There are three strands to it.

The first strand concerns having management development processes for senior management at executive level in Horse Racing Ireland with a view to identifying internal candidates who might be in a position to compete for the role of chief executive officer in five years' time. That was a very useful exercise.

Second, there is now a defined timeline that works backwards from 2021, when Mr. Kavanagh's contract is to terminate. There is a process working backwards whereby a job specification is to be drawn up, the position is to be advertised and an appointment is to be made with a six-month transition between the person taking office and Mr. Kavanagh finishing in the role. That has been a positive lesson learned from what has happened over the past little while.