Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I am very concerned. We have sought to update governance arrangements to ensure it does not happen again. We have put a number of elements in the code of practice, in particular the code of governance, to deal with issues that have come up in this regard and we will continue to do so. We did that before the Comptroller and Auditor General's review was complete. We will listen to the views of this committee and we might seek to update the code of governance further. We have amended procedures on minor, small devolved projects and on big devolved building projects as a result of, among other things, the lessons we have learned in this regard. We have not seen anything that would cause concerns that there might be similar activities elsewhere in the ETB sector but that does not mean we can take absolute assurance from that. We are seeking to develop the role of the independent internal audit service for the ETBs further and we have a number of arrangements in the code of governance to examine issues. We will be considering different types of thematic reviews within the sector to see if we have learned from the lessons.

The biggest lessons for me are: how can we ensure that members of ETBs have an oversight, and how can we ensure that the culture within an ETB, both members and staff, allows for people to look at other people's behaviour and where there are difficulties in that behaviour there are arrangements in place for a culture of challenge? That is an overall governance challenge, and that is what we must examine. The training we are putting in place on the code of governance will hopefully assist in that regard. Obviously, however, the findings are very strong in both the Thorn report and the Comptroller and Auditor General's report.