Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

I will deal with Console. Console was a section 39 agency. Some of the same principles apply. Just to be clear, our role in terms of Console was to ensure, first and foremost, that we were getting value for money and the services for which we were paying. The HSE was satisfied that it was getting the services from Console for which it paid. The governance arrangements within Console are absolutely a matter of concern for the HSE and we certainly do not deny that. They are also a matter of concern for the board of Console so if the Deputy is asking me how we are seeking to improve our overall governance and monitoring, which the Comptroller and Auditor General referenced, I can tell her that we are taking a number of steps.

We have an overall governance framework, a national central compliance unit which administers that and provides support to us and a series of agreements in varying levels of detail depending on whether we are providing funding of over or less than €250,000. The annual compliance statement for the section 38 agencies has been in place from 2014 and we extended it to the larger section 39 organisations for 2016 - all those organisations over receiving over €3 million - so that is about 54 more agencies. Those two together represent north of 90% of the total funding we give to those agencies. We are carrying out the Deloitte external review of the section 38 organisations. That is intended to become a five-year cyclical piece. The area where we are in most difficulty, particularly when one gets to the volume of section 39 organisations, is in having sufficient capacity within our CHOs to be able to monitor those arrangements effectively.