Mr. Derek Moran:

Is a bit more than that. With the management advisory committee, one issue within the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 and the legislation generally is that management essentially is the Secretary General and the committee was advisory to that. One cannot have collective responsibility. Ultimately the person responsible for the accounts and the disbursement of moneys is myself but with the executive board, we have tried to give people responsibility for both their slice of policy and for corporate responsibility for the success of the Department as a whole.

That is a fairly substantial change on what went heretofore. For example, my colleague, Mr. John McCarthy, is the chief economist but he also sits on the audit committee and is the chairman of the oversight committee on freedom of information. My colleague, Mr. John Hogan, in addition to being in the banking division also deals with all the financial aspects of the Department. What we have tried to do is make it much more of a collective entity, albeit that it cannot legally be a collective entity. It is a fairly substantial shift in the way management committees operate.