Mr. Seamus O'Loughlin:

I just felt I was being sidelined. I imagine a position was taken as regards me at a point in time which was not reflective of my intentions. Organisations, by their nature, defend themselves and I was seen as a threat. If the issues I had been raising were embraced, we would have had a totally different outcome. People within the company who I know and respect are perplexed as to how we have got to this point. I was not a malcontent roaring and shouting about nothing. I was bringing forward issues and proposed solutions which were implementable. We were coming towards the end of the transformation programme and with the budget deficit and the volume of issues I was bringing up the line, it was a perfect storm. In safety management, they talk about the Swiss cheese model in that one needs seven or eight issues to line up to cause a significant incident. In our industry one must be fastidious about health and safety and environmental issues. Bad practices might come in. We had another issue with fault location vans and the point was made to me that the company had never had an incident with one of the vans. They had not been maintained, repaired or calibrated in 20 years. I made the point in response that just because we had got away with it up to now is a bit like someone saying he does not wear a seat belt driving to Dublin and had never had an accident, so why should he wear one now. People need the safety stuff when they need it.