Mr. Tony O'Brien:

What I can tell the Deputy is that I was not made aware in the way that I should have been of this case. This case went into legal process, I believe, in January and was concluded in April. There would have been opportunities before and during that case for someone to recognise the seriousness of what was happening and to escalate it to me. They did not. In a different forum, many of the people who might have escalated it to me confirmed that they had not. They had nothing to gain by confirming that; in fact, they potentially had things to lose. They confirmed that they had not escalated it to me. Because it was not escalated to me, there was no potential for any alarm bell to ring in my head. Had I been aware of it, alarm bells would have rung. I said to a different committee yesterday, at which Deputy Kelly was present, that had I known that there were a significant number of women who had gone through the same audit process and who had not been made aware of their results, the first thing I would have done would have been to make sure they were aware of those results so that, by the time this did come into the public domain in the way it did, there would have been no cause or reason for other women to be concerned that they might be about to be told. That is one of the most regrettable aspects of this whole case.