Mr. John Barrett:

The answers were less than satisfactory from my perspective. I sought, therefore, to dig deeper. As I did so, a number of matters came to my attention about people who were not, as it were, in the Garda Vote and those who were serving in the restaurant or doing other activities who I understood up to that point were civil servants and employed in the Garda College. Immediately I began to get sight of what was, essentially, a private enterprise operating within the Garda College. I raised my concerns about this. Barry McGee very kindly, and I did not understand it was Michael at the back of this, gave me a copy of a report, because I asked him to assist me. It was a copy of a report he did in 2008. When I got that, I read it. It is about 18 pages and I scanned through it very quickly. I rang Cyril and said, "Cyril, just got this. I have asked Barry to make a copy for you." Cyril had not seen it up to that point in time.

That is what he assured me, but the Deputy herself can ask him the question. He and I began a dialogue about what to do about this. Then we discovered there was a 2010 report done by Assistant Commission Jack Nolan, and Jack was very forthcoming and very helpful to me in my inquiries around this. The lineage of the issue became clear to me.

I met with Mr. Culhane and Mr. McGee in my office at 14.15 on 30 June - this is in the report, at page 38 - and we discussed this quite openly. My minute of the meeting is contemporaneous - it is right there. The meeting began with my summary of the concerns on the general financial controls in the college, the need to appoint a qualified accountant and for that accountant to report, solid-line, to the CFO and, dotted line, to me as executive director. This was seen as a good idea by the CFO, though it immediately pointed to a limited number of senior personnel to draw upon. In response also, the CFO outlined the independence which the college had historically exercised. This was all news to me. I could not, quite frankly, get my head around the idea that we had these independent operations within the Garda college.

The meeting examined the need to seek a link between activity and cost in a meaningful system of accounting, like ABC, activity based costing, which would seek to hold resource managers to account for their stewardship of staff and all other types of resources. I expressed the view that finance and HR should collaborate around that initiative so that we could better link deployment of operational choices to some kind of standard efficient measures.

My approach to this was entirely open-handed. I assumed we were all in this-----