Mr. Rob Morrison:

Another serious problem was the fact that in the gallery on the night, there was a senior editorial figure but he was involved in talking to politicians on the floor and journalists in the green room. This is an important point from the report. It required somebody to be there solely to watch the programme on transmission to ensure all compliance issues and all issues around balance were addressed. That person was not there for the entire programme and if the person had been there, he or she would surely have seen that no question was addressed to Michael D. Higgins. That was a definite failing and it is one of our key recommendations.

There were other issues around allegations of people being given questions to ask and having questions written for them. Again, there was a complicated system for backup questioners. We only found one person, again as a result of the floods, who was given a question to ask that was not theirs. In others words, they had not written it; it had been written by a person who had not turned up. Even still, we considered that inappropriate and wrong. Questions were swapped where people were not expected to turn up and people were brought in off the substitutes bench. They maybe had a question and they were asked to swap their question for another question. It was again absolutely unnecessarily complicated and that was inappropriate at least.

There is a certain degree of redrafting of questions because of legal issues or because the question is too long. This happens on all programmes. It was not unique to this programme. Most programmers to whom we spoke, from the BBC in London and UTV, said quite a lot of redrafting of questions goes on but not to the point where they are rewritten. We found in the report that it came much closer to rewriting than we would like. However, we did not find any evidence - and this was a judgment - that a question had been written by the production team for a member of the public.

We concluded that the method of selection of the audience, given it was a presidential election debate, was inappropriate. It would have been appropriate for a regular edition and I have worked on similar style programmes to "The Frontline".

With regard to other issues, we found that training was poor.

We also found that awareness of RTE editorial guidelines was low. This was true of staff and freelancers as the latter worked on this programme. Those were the main findings of the editorial review.