Mr. John Kearney:

In terms of context, we are multifaceted in our engagement with stakeholders. Right across the education fraternity, we engage with all stakeholders, including AsIAm, Inclusion Ireland, Down Syndrome Ireland, Chime and Féach. They are all necessary stakeholders for us to engage with. As the Senator rightly identifies, they are a massive layer of resource and insight to us in that they work continuously, as all Deputies here do on the ground, with parents and young children. They are a massive layer of support and insight to us in enhancing our service delivery.

Now, there is a corporate governance element as well, and the Senator correctly identifies the necessary safeguarding arrangements that have to be put in place. This was very much an open procurement process. There was an independent review panel as well. The integrity of the programme was properly assessed by us. Any submissions we received for that particular element of programme delivery were independently assessed. All those parameters would have been satisfied in this procurement process.

As to what the Senator alluded to in his second query, individual schooling communities do have arrangements whereby they can come to us looking for funding, or a lot of the time they independently fund their own training programmes for their schools. We were looking at this in terms of offering another layer of support to schools. Equally, rather than having 50 or 60 different training programmes being delivered around the country, we were looking for an integral, professional, consistent programme that could be delivered at a consistent standard and that we could very much support and assist schools with, while ensuring that the integrity of the programme would be upheld.