Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will advise the former Secretary General, Mr. Burgess, to make a brief comment. I refer to the inference in the previous series of questions that I somehow instructed the Department to create a job. That is not the case. Anybody who knows the former Secretary General of my Department and how my Department functions knows that it says "No" to me when it does not agree with a decision or it is not comfortable with it. That was not the case here. I worked with the Secretary General. We saw an opportunity for a special envoy role. It was what many other countries were doing at the same time. The UK also announced a special envoy for LGBTQ rights and other countries have been doing the same. We saw it as an opportunity. We saw Katherine Zappone as an experienced person who was suitable for that role. We developed that concept robustly in the Department and got no negative feedback from our team in Geneva, who are the human rights experts, from our team in New York, which works with the UN, or from our team in Dublin. I ask the Secretary General to make a brief comment to back up what he already said to the committee last week.