Ms Maureen Kennelly:

Absolutely. We brought forward a workforce plan in October 2021. I mentioned earlier that there was no head of HR in place when I joined in April 2022. Neither was there a head of IT. There were very significant parts of the organisation that were absolutely not resourced, which was most regrettable. I brought in a very senior HR person and worked with her very intensively to bring forward a workforce plan. As I said, the council approved that in October 2021 and then I sent it to the Department in November 2021. I highlighted for it that the senior resource in IT was the critical role we wanted to appoint. We wanted to appoint that at principal officer level. The head of IT role that was within the Arts Council before that was just at HEO level. It was far too junior for a project of this scale. I sent that to the principal officer in the Department who was my designated line of contact, with whom I had a very regular flow of information about the whole project throughout the whole project and throughout my whole tenure. She accepted the urgency of it, I think, but our discussions continued right throughout 2022 and into 2023. There was no approval for it. The Department wanted us to recruit at a lower level, at AP higher. It felt it would not be able to get the approval from the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform for it. We contested that we absolutely needed it at PO level.