Dr. Deirdre Keyes:

As part of our roadmap forward, the whole area of procurement, internal controls around procurement, conflicts of interest vis-à-visprocurement and disclosures are all part of one very important picture. We have prioritised the area of procurement in terms of our responses to the Thorn report and also as part of, as the director of schools has referred to, our corporate governance programme.

On our procurement process, we have adopted, since 2018, the ETB sectoral policy on procurement which is very, very robust. Within that there are internal controls about a number of things that relate to procurement. There would be procurement authority, financial authority, etc., and then the conflict of interest management is integral to the internal control around the procurement process and other processes.

We have our conflict of interest management procedure and I suppose that is in line with the ethics of public office where people declare. We are very mindful of the fact that, in the context of the history and in the context of creating a culture of corporate governance, we must have a system for emerging conflicts of interest. Therefore, that is inserted at various stages of the procurement process, and also the opportunity to disclose. Staff are mindful of that.