Dr. Fergal Lynch:

I will move to the procurement issue the Deputy raised. I again agree with him that it is an area where Departments fall into difficulty. One of our internal audit reports, which is a good and valuable report for us, gave us a limited assurance rather than a reasonable assurance, which is the full extent, and that was last June. The criticisms were entirely valid and they were related to failing in certain circumstances to ensure that our contracts were on file or, in some of the earlier cases, and I stress that they were earlier, failing to have clear end dates or start dates. We now have a procurement unit to attend to all of this. We established a specific procurement unit within the Department, which has a centralised contract register that keeps all the supporting documentation and advises all of the units around the Department on procurement issues. I expect that the chances of fairly basic and small errors, which should not happen, happening now are greatly reduced since the establishment of a small but focused procurement unit within the Department.