Dr. Alan Wall:

In fairness to the institution, I did. There is a history of the HEA dealing with the institution, which predates my time there, where that would not have been the case and a more pugilistic approach would have been taken to any intervention by the HEA. There might have been a desire to obscure, to delay or in some way to derail any actions that the HEA was anxious to do. There was a quickness on the part of UL and other institutions to point out the legal deficits of any kind of approach the university was subject to. This has not been our experience. Our relationship has not just been one of swapping letters. We deliberately went to the campus and made ourselves available to anyone who wanted to speak to us. We got a very clear insight into the cultural issues that people are talking about.

Deputy Murphy has referred to the reasons I might have not to believe some of the things I am told in UL, given the previous experiences when I was told things that simply were not true. Over the past six months, my experience has been confidence building, as we have worked through this process. Let me say that it is a very invasive process, for the first time in the history of the State, but we are getting full co-operation from the university. There is a sense in the university that owning these issues is the way forward. This is an autonomous institution; it has a governing authority and has specific requirements in law under the Universities Act 1997 and under the spending code that it was not paying attention to. I think there is-----