Mr. Tom Boland:

There is no system or process in place that would have informed us and therefore we could not have known. The "should not have known" phrase relates to what would be the role of an agency like the HEA and, from a purely practical point of view, it cannot dig down into that level of detail of all the accounts of 30 institutions spending somewhere in the order €2.5 billion. There has to be an appropriate division of labour and responsibility in this space and the first line of responsibility has to be, and is as a matter of law, with the institution, its chief officer and its governing body. Of course when the HEA becomes aware of something like this, we have an obligation to act and interrogate to establish what happened and to look at systems and how they failed but we do not have that role in terms of interrogating the detailed accounts of an institution. We could not have it. We would require a great deal of resources to do it. There would be an excessive duplication of effort there.