Mr. John Hogan:

I will go back for a second to what the Chairman said. He asked earlier whether there were staffing issues. He also said how important it is to fulfil statutory duties. He is absolutely correct. When I studied the code of governance for State bodies, it stated comply or explain. In our case, we would like to explain there were staffing issues. We do not blame the Department or anybody for this. We went through a serious recession. There was an embargo and a moratorium on staff. The two VECs in Tipperary were merged and we were not given the support we have now, such as a director of organisational support, a director of schools and a director of further education and training. We had no senior middle management team as such, and we had two financing systems in operation, one in Nenagh and another in Clonmel. Both of these were manually done through spreadsheets. We had no high speed connection between the two offices. We had a serious lack of IT infrastructure and a lack of staff due to the moratorium. We were also constrained by the 90 km between the offices.

We think we had a fantastic achievement in submitting our accounts in 2015. I say "fair play" to Carlow-Kilkenny ETB because it is an excellent board. Its final accounts for 2015 were submitted approximately two weeks before our final accounts were submitted. I know its draft accounts were in by the statutory deadline. We have been contending with infrastructure and staff deficits. The 2016 accounts for Kilkenny were submitted two or three weeks ago. We are told that our accounts will be done tomorrow. Thanks to the Department, at long last we have the staff and the high-speed interconnection between the offices. We have everything in place now. I am setting a constructive challenge to be met by our board this time next year. Kilkenny pipped us in 2014 and 2015, but in 2016-----