Mr. Evan Cullen:

During the statements following the publication of the R116 accident report, the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, placed great emphasis on a report by Bureau Veritas which they described as an independent review of the Irish Aviation Authority, IAA, national safety oversight regulation. What was astonishing to us was that these were statements around a search and rescue accident and yet the scope of the review covered the full range of activities in respect of aircraft operations but specifically left out search and rescue.

We did not have a copy of the Bureau Veritas report; it had not been published when the Minister and the Minister of State made those statements in the Dáil and Seanad. What they left out is outlined under the methodology section on page 11 of the Bureau Veritas report. It states:

The scope of the review was to cover the range of activities that fall to the IAA within its role as national regulator under the 1993 act. [...]

In view of the travel restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the review was performed remotely. Therefore this review was not a full audit as it was not able to perform an in depth examination of the evidence to establish if there were any non-compliances in the execution of the tasks related to the regulations.

In effect, it was a desk review rather than-----