Professor Nick Hardwick:

I am rather surprised by that because when we made it clear what the issues we were going to look at were, it was the case that all the information we used was obtained from Oberstown itself. Other parties could not have been confused by what we were looking at. If we should not have looked at some of these wider policy issues, then it is surprising to me that the recommendations addressing those wider policy issues were published. If a party can publish the recommendations, why can that party not publish the material that supports those recommendations?

At the request of the Minister, I had a telephone conversation with her on 21 December 2016 because she wanted a heads-up on what the review found before it was published. At that point she specifically asked me about our views on some of the national policy issues we addressed in the report. At no time did we get any indication that there was concern about us addressing those issues. Of course we accept that some of those were not things that Oberstown itself could deal with, but they were altogether relevant to the difficulties that Oberstown was exposed to at that time.