Professor Nick Hardwick:

We were committed to return for a discussion of our findings and recommendations. People might have told us then that they did not agree with our findings and we could have discussed that. They could have told us that we had got certain things wrong, but instead we ended up floundering around trying to guess the problem so that we could put it right, which has been very frustrating for us. To emphasise Professor Goldson's remarks, in issues such as Oberstown, if one does not understand and accept what has gone wrong, one will not do what is necessary to put it right. What we are interested in is putting this stuff right and learning from it. One cannot learn if one does not accept where things have not worked as one would like.

I was responsible for this area in the UK and would always tell my teams that they should never forget that it is much harder to run these places than it is to monitor and evaluate them. I accept entirely that the people running Oberstown have a very difficult job. Our intention, and what we had hoped that we had done, was to produce something that would help them in that process.