Mr. Tony O'Brien:

The way the public system is structured in Ireland is particular. Contrary to what might be expected, the head of a public service organisation - this relates to the conversation on Deputy Kelleher's questions about future trusts - does not have control in the formal sense over the numbers of staff that an organisation is able to employ, their rates of remuneration or, ultimately, above a certain grade, the blend of structure of his or her management team where he or she requires levels of approval which go beyond his or her parent Department or the Department under whose aegis he or she operates to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, and those processes take a little while. Ultimately, the Public Appointments Service is responsible for carrying out the campaign and it will do so efficiently and effectively, but at the point at which I was telling the management team - which was what that communication was - that this was to happen, which I needed to do in order to involve it in some of the process, I could not be specific about the timetable because I did not have control over when those approvals would come and I used ambiguous language.