Professor Willie Donnelly:

Put it this way, the financial controller knew I had a conflict of interest because I declared it. It is important I am given time to say the following. Consider the situation we were in. This was 2010 and the economy had collapsed. The State had given us €800,000 of investment in research and innovation in intellectual property, IP, that was generated. We had gone through two phases of attempting to commercialise that IP with two separate, external companies and both had failed because of the economic situation. We had a situation whereby, contrary to the national situation, venture capital companies were willing to put €400,000 on the table. The IP policy said for assignment-----