Mr. Feargal Ó Coigligh:

I am the Accounting Officer for the Department and I am speaking on behalf of the Department. I am taking responsibility for the failures of the Department as addressed in the report which I commissioned. That is how accountability works. We are here today to provide transparency on what went wrong. I commissioned a report carried out by the former head of internal audit. We published that report. There is not one word redacted from the report. I have not heard anybody taking issue with the findings in the report. The report is not pleasant reading for the Department nor for the Arts Council. This is how we take responsibility and accountability for what went wrong: identify what went wrong and make sure it does not happen again.