Mr. Robert Watt:

I am very happy that the secondment process was appropriate, and I am very happy that it is consistent with other secondments that take place within the civil and public service; I am very happy with that. As I said previously to previous committees and in my report, the communications of this created a lot of uncertainty or a lot of misinformation because of the way it leaked before things were finalised, and that created, I think, some wrong impressions which, unfortunately, have stayed as part of the public debate.

In terms of what we are trying to achieve, I am very happy that we were motivated by the public interest in trying to do the right thing by Dr. Holohan and by what we thought was appropriate, given what we had gone through with the pandemic and given the need for us to enhance research capacity across the university system.