Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

On the first phone call on Thursday last week, the official was told early in the morning that I had been given incorrect information and the former chair said she had made an error and she now recalled that while she had said the board had no role whatsoever, actually she had chaired the remuneration committee that had approved it. The official came back to me and told me this. I found it hard to believe given the extent of the questioning I had done earlier that week, so I asked the official to go back and say that surely it was not approved because it was said on so many occasions, and I think it was flagged that I was considering writing to her at that stage. She again expressed regret at the error and then said she had phoned the former Secretary General last October to say that a deal had been done with the legal team and she said she imagined that she would also have referred to the role of the remuneration committee in that conversation. The language used was that she imagined she would have referred to the role of the remuneration committee in that conversation.