Mr. David Kelly:

With regard to the Department's position, as I mentioned earlier, the first time the financial difficulties were signalled to us was in July 2023. They were characterised as a cash flow issue. At that time the Department advised the trust that it needed to notify the regulators. On foot of that, the trust notified the Charities Regulatory Authority and the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority, AHBRA, as these were notifiable events under the regulatory codes. At that stage, through the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, DRHE, we provided funding to support governance expertise to go into the trust: there was a procurement process to put in governance expertise to support the trust. PricewaterhouseCoopers went in there and through that work identified the extent of it. In this way we identified the very significant going concern issues which required the emergency funding. I do not think it would be fair to say that the Department is hands off on this. We were quite involved-----