Mr. Christy Mannion:

The issue was that the Public Appointments Service felt that the process of running appointments left something to be desired from its point of view, because of the fact that many of the times it ran a competition the outgoing person might have been re-appointed and that there was a great deal of time taken up with that aspect of its work. The service made certain proposals relating to how it might be done differently. We have had discussions with the technological Higher Education Authority and we have come up with a number of proposals in that regard. It will take longer to work that out and to get agreement on that. In the meantime a decision will be made in the next couple of weeks as to how this progresses.