Mr. Tony O'Brien:

I expect to be in those shoes before this process is over. Along this journey, there will be encounters with the boards and chairs of those agencies about which we are not satisfied. We will be wanting to establish exactly on what basis they believed they were able to approve such top-ups. If they are contending, as some of them still are, that they are compliant, then I will be looking for absolute verifiable evidence to support their compliance - in other words, the flip side of the Chairman’s questions as to what is on the files in the Departments of Health and Public Expenditure and Reform.

I will be looking for an action plan from them as to how they are going to attain compliance. I must recognise that in some instances, they will have contractual issues to overcome and it may take some time for them to extract themselves but we will be looking to ensure that public funds are not used to pay unauthorised allowances. In some instances, we have already made deductions from grants to agencies equivalent to the amount they were paying from public funds in an unauthorised way. That is only a first step but we will certainly be going down those roads.