Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My apologies. While all of this is ongoing and there was knowledge across the organisation of a serious discrepancy from an accounting perspective, the board went ahead with its recruitment and appointment of Kevin Bakhurst as the incoming DG. It announced it on 18 April, despite a serious audit issue hanging over the outgoing DG, Dee Forbes, and RTÉ's highest-paid presenter just happened to announce he was leaving a five-year contract on 16 March.

Did it not make sense at the time to pause the appointment of Kevin Bakhurst and continue to apply the necessary scrutiny to something you were all aware of at the time, resolve that and bring clarity to that before you went ahead and appointed him? Having the person that you all seem to apportion blame to kind of walking off the pitch in the middle of the crisis seems strange from a management perspective. Why did that occur?