Mr. Kevin McCarthy:

The pledge process overall has been complex. When the Irish Red Cross set out to embark on it at the earlier stage of the crisis, it probably did so on the basis of previous pledge programme responses and its experience with those. Obviously, however, this has been way in excess of anything that had gone before in terms of the scale of what was involved. As I referenced earlier, we had to support the Irish Red Cross in terms of additional resourcing to assist it in managing those early phases. More particularly, the role of the local authorities came into play by way of activating and trying to activate those pledges on the ground, given the scale of what was involved. It is a very intensive process.