Professor Shane Kilcommins:

Having worked in the school of law for seven years and the faculty, my feeling on the ground when I worked there was that there was a strong culture with colleagues. There was a real sense of service to the university among staff and a strong sense of contribution and the life-enhancing opportunities the staff were providing through the institution. One of the things that is becoming apparent, however, and will be apparent to the Deputy is that, with respect to culture, the trust in the senior management is low among staff. That is so for a number of reasons, including the fact that repeated governance issues have come up since 2015. We saw it in the Deloitte report, the Mazars report of 2016, the "Prime Time" TV programme in 2017, the Thorn review of the same year, the 2018 report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the issue of the Dunnes Stores site that arose in 2019. It has been repeated and that undermines trust in the institution and in the leadership of the institution. That goes right up to the Rhebogue transaction in 2022.