Ms MaryRose McGovern:

The other thing to bear in mind is that the Supreme Court view was that the blanket prohibition on public hearings caused the difficulty with respect to the provisions of article 37 of the Constitution. Having the means to hold a hearing in public will be adequate to satisfy that requirement. In working with the Department when these draft heads were being prepared, we spent some time looking at other bodies. Although they are not quite the same as they often focus on regulatory inquiries of professions, there were several instances where hearings are held in private in the main, but each of the bodies had the ability to hold a hearing in public. That is the context in which the head was drafted.