Mr. David Moloney:

Yes. This is our first attempt to try to bring clarity to this, just within the Civil Service. Many of the issues that have arisen are in relation to proposed secondments between the Civil Service and the wider public service. That is an area we can certainly look at. The one thing I would say is that there is a huge number of secondments, they are really valuable to the system and they occur in a huge variety of different circumstances. They occur in many different ways - for example, with international institutions, with the Irish Government Economic Evaluation Service, the Attorney General's office and the Central Statistics Office. Experts are seconded for periods of time into Government offices. On occasion, those experts become quite imbedded in those Government offices and the secondment evolves in a way that makes it permanent. What we are trying to do is to twin mobility and secondment policy. We are trying to make all of that more transparent and make the conditions under which that could happen clearer. The mobility policy is preferred as the vehicle to achieve permanent transfers and secondment policy, by and large, is there to facilitate temporary transfers.