Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

The Minister of State and his Department were going down the road of negotiating a bilateral agreement with Vietnam when they pulled out of it. That happened because it started the negotiations too late and then it pulled out because of international draft reports that came to the attention of the Minister of State. There is no point in travelling that route other than to state that people were caught in difficulties because of what was, frankly, a failure of this State - not only of Vietnam with regard to standards - to monitoring the working of the bilateral agreement. The issue of finance derived directly from the bilateral agreement which, wrongly, made arrangements to ensure particular payments were made which were not supposed to be linked to adoption but which, inevitably, would get caught up in it.

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