Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for being here today. I just want to put the questions asked by committee members to date in context. I think the witnesses have been very open in the way they have answered the questions. The difficulty is that some of the responses have elicited more questions. It is only right that members of the committee have an opportunity to follow up on those questions. We should all just take a moment. Our job is to try to get to the bottom of that. I would say one thing though. There are lots of side posts here, that there is not a fully functioning relationship between the senior management team and the board in IFI, or there has not been, and that there are problems. While €,5000 is not the be all and end all of the future of IFI it does help to identify and illustrate the working relationships that were happening at the time. I think that is why Deputy Dillon is correct to try to focus on some of these issues and I will do so again.

I find how this arrangement began really unusual. The reason I do is because hundreds of thousands of people right across Ireland changed their workplaces, carried out their work in different ways, and in different manners. I cannot think of any other scenario that I have heard of, even informally - and I am on boards and so on - where a person's employment was changed. As a HR director, a change of employment means something. It carries an additional cost to the company. It is not about where someone works, it is about their legal place of work for Revenue and for purposes of travel and subsistence. I will go back to Mr. O’Donnell and just ask the question - is he saying that he did not request this, that this idea did not come from him; that he did not speak to Ms Bradley; he did not speak to the chairman and this was something that was put to him for the first time?