Mr. ?anna Rowe:

As alluded to earlier, we do not have a board. That is a matter for the Government. We have a monitoring committee made up of our two-parent Departments. It is chaired by assistant secretaries in both Departments and has members from those two Departments. It meets four times a year with the senior management team in Waterways Ireland and there are various governance arrangements etc. attached to it.

The second committee is our risk and audit committee. It is an independent committee made up of an independent chair and two nominees, one from each Department. It also has representation from the Northern Ireland Audit Office, NIAO, the Comptroller and Auditor General and the parent Departments. That is the governance and audit oversight in Waterways Ireland.

As was alluded to earlier, when the North-South bodies were established, three of them had boards and three did not. That was a matter for the Governments at the time. The St. Andrews Agreement committed to providing boards to the remaining three but, again, that is a matter for the Government and is not within the gift of Waterways Ireland.