Ms Mary Hurley:

We reported the matter to the Local Government Audit Service and to the National Oversight and Audit Commission, NOAC. We also met them to discuss issues so, for future planning, they are aware of it in terms of their annual planning. Ms Niamh Larkin, the head of the audit service, has worked really proactively and positively with us.

To go back to the Deputy's question regarding the additional controls that were put in place, we obviously reviewed our own schemes and our own controls. We discovered the issue through our own internal audit, but just to make sure that we had stronger controls ourselves, we put arrangements in place where we get at least two progress reports per project and we look for before and after pictures of the projects funded. Within our own Department we have put in additional training for our staff, and our inspection services have completed a schemes manual which has been rolled out across the Department so that there is consistency of approach. In our own Department we looked at what we did, we increased some of the inspections particularly on the ORIS side, and we put in enhanced arrangements in our Department, although our control system had itself had discovered this issue. While we engaged with Mayo and when we recouped the funding, we also ceased and paused payments and project approvals to Mayo.