Mr. Michael Gaffey:

If it is okay, Chairman, I shall deal briefly with the question of the Administrative Tribunal. I know the committee was dissatisfied with the response it received from the president of the tribunal. As the Secretary General said, if we were crafting his answer in the circumstances, we could have thought of a more satisfactory reply to give to a visiting public accounts committee. While I do not wish to make excuses, there are a number of issues concerning formality and translation. In addition, he had just sent his report to parliament and perhaps felt slightly precluded from talking about it in detail. Second, as the Secretary General has said, the president presided over the audit of a percentage of the overall government budget and clearly was not ready to discuss the details of Ireland's contribution, which was an element of that budget.

Setting that aside and taking account of what the Secretary General has said about the work we are doing with the Mozambique system on the capacity issue, concerns have been raised by the committee on that specific office. It could be useful if we were to ask our ambassador to make some recommendations on what specific assistance Ireland can provide through its programme that would take account of some of those concerns. If we could get a report back on that we would be able to satisfy, or at least inform, the committee of some action that will be taken building on that experience.