Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 12 July 2018
Public Accounts Committee
Business of Committee
9:00 am
Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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As there is clearly a Garda investigation under way into this matter, the committee may well be limited in terms of what it can find out about the case until the investigation concludes. Irrespective of whether the foundation is consolidated, the same risk potentially applies to other universities. There is not much point in deriving some learning from this if we do not share it subsequently. Does the Higher Education Authority, HEA, assume that function? Who assumes the function of putting systems in place that are less likely to be attacked in the way this one was? The subject of this attack was one person, according to this letter. It was not a range of people. It seems as though there is a control issue here. I do not know how we should address this matter. Perhaps it should be done by a sectoral committee or by writing to the HEA. How do we deal with this issue? Obviously, if one college has had an incident of this profile, others will have had the same.