Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

I will repeat again that the most up-to-date information was available to the Commission. It was submitted at every Council of Ministers meeting and meetings with the presidency and the relevant Commissioner at the time. In fairness, none of us would have had time to examine the auditors' report in detail as we would have liked to have done. There seems to be a view in the House that the Commission should have collected data on the productivity of the 200 sugar factories in existence at the time and picked out the least productive. That was not the approach taken by the Commission. It was a voluntary restructuring.

See this speech in context