Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 24 May 2018

Public Accounts Committee

Financial Statements 2016: Higher Education Authority, University College Cork and Cork Institute of Technology

9:00 am

Mr. Paul Gallagher:

I will take that. This was in relation to a series of anonymous letters in which 196 allegations were being made against the institution. We have been through quite a bit of this, starting with December 2015 in the Committee of Public Accounts. There was a very significant amount of personal information contained in all of that, in terms of reports and so on. At the time we asked for some advice in terms of how we would treat that. Again that is an issue that is continuing to build for us with tomorrow, the GDPR and so on. It is a particular concern for us in that none of those allegations was substantiated, so it was not fair to be connecting individuals with those allegations. We have talked a lot about redactions and so on, but we needed to be sure we were protecting that personal information and we sought advice accordingly.