Ms Geraldine Tallon:

It would be fair to say in these circumstances that the Department, as well as the Comptroller and Auditor General, would recognise that my colleague was in a difficult position as a board member given the potential for conflict between the board member fiduciary duty and the line responsibilities in the Department. I was not there at the time but subsequently I introduced a clear delineation of responsibilities which separated board membership and departmental responsibility. Ms Moran did not have the luxury of being in that situation. There is the reality that, under the Docklands legislation, disclosure of confidential information as a member of the board or the council is an offence. That is quite explicitly stated in the legislation.

The 2001 code, which applied at the time, set out the collective responsibility and authority of the board to be safeguarded and at any time the Department is one member of that collective and the board has to take responsibility as a board. There were clear procedures set out in the code. Our understanding in so far as the Department was concerned was that they were being observed. Annual reports, for example, included a compliance statement. As Deputy Harris and Deputy Nash have identified, this is a bit of a grey area in the code, even in terms of the 2010 protocol that applied to non-commercial semi-State bodies. This is an area that we think needs to be the subject of live and active engagement by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.