Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for coming in to the committee. This is an important session. The previous iteration of this committee had tried quite hard to get them and other players in to the committee last year. It is important to understand why we wanted to do that. We took a view as a committee on a cross-party basis that given the severity of what has happened in 2023, it was crucial that the public were made aware of exactly what had happened, but more importantly, what measures were being put in place to ensure it did not happen again either in the trust or in any other similar organisation.

I am conscious this is the first public appearance the trust has made and therefore I think the witnesses’ testimony is important for all the reasons they said, to demonstrate transparency, accountability and compliance. I would like them to tell us a little more around the nature of the serious financial and governance issues. I think the public has the right to hear from them the scale of those and in particular the thorny issue of how the trust underbid significantly for tenders and was then unable to fund those tenders and cross-subsidised capital funding for current funding.

I invite the witnesses to give us more detail about what systems have been put in place to ensure something like this does not happen again. There are two issues I am particularly keen to hear from them about. One is how it will not be possible to cross-subsidise in that manner in future. Second, there was a massive failure not only on the executive but on the then board. What measures are in place now to ensure that if there were problematic behaviours at an executive level – I know there will not be but if there were – we can be confident that the board as it is now constituted is fit to do the job that the previous board did not do?