Mr. Conor Skehan:

I thank Deputy Ó Broin, who was measured as ever, for the opportunity to open up those issues. First, I home in on his concern about crossing a line in terms of my role in the agency. The first thing to bear in mind is that I am chairman of the board and not a member of staff. My job as chair and our job as the board is to challenge our executive - sometimes to say, "Well done", sometimes to say, "Try harder" and sometimes to say, "Look harder."

I teach and one of these issues - the one the Deputy is raising here - is the absence of evidence. Absence of evidence is a very specific thing we teach our students. There is an old phrase that the absence of evidence is sometimes not the same thing as evidence of absence. We teach the students that by giving them the following example. We are in a room, I send all the students to the window and ask them to look out on the lawn and tell me if there is an elephant on the lawn. They come back and say that there is no elephant, which is excellent and well observed. I then ask the next student to go to the window and tell me if there are ants on the lawn. The student comes back and says: "I don't know; I can't see any." To which I respond: "Well, maybe you need to go out and look harder."

This is the category of argument I am putting to the committee here. In my role in the agency, people send me stuff. I will read out three or four examples from different aspects of stuff that people send me that give me the grounds for making exactly the remarks the Deputy is so concerned about. If they are true, we should all be concerned about it and if they are not true, we should all be relieved that they are not true because they are precisely that class of data he referred to as anecdote and no basis for policy. Therefore, we are both in complete agreement.