Ms Nóirín O'Sullivan:

To clarify in respect of Mr. Barrett's "A Critical Inflection Point", the first I saw of that document was when it was here at the first committee meeting I believe. As a point of record, it is very disadvantageous to be asked to read documents in a committee room in the course of a meeting. It would have been preferable to have had the opportunity to see the documents beforehand and it would be much better from a learning point of view if they were all shared with the witnesses beforehand. It is very difficult for me to get into the mindsets of people but I can say that the historical context is that this was a funding model established some time around the time of the Walsh report in the 1980s. It was a very complex structure at the time with the per capitagrants being given. It then developed and became even more complex in nature and the practices that developed around that prior to the time of the Commissioner's becoming Accounting Officer became very complex and unwieldy. That is evidenced by the fact that they were so complex when we began the work in 2015 that trying to unravel them and distinguish what was what was very tedious.