Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

My understanding of why it was not seen is that the predicted results were very close to what was expected. There was a variance from historic patterns by, I think, 4%. All the analysis done by all the different tiers of State expertise and officials mentioned by the Deputy came to the conclusion that that was roughly what we expected. There was no other variation that in any way indicated that this coding error had been made whereby the bottom two of the junior certificate results were counted rather than the top next two. It was only when the person responsible for that ran the applied leaving certificate results that there was a variation he could not quite understand. He then looked through the 50,000 lines of code – he had certain expertise having written much of it – to find out what it was and he reported it back. The variation was not categorised in any one area, in any one school or in any one subject. It did not lead to a significant change in what the results would otherwise have been. It is still appropriate, to my mind, to adjust this to be absolutely correct and accurate in terms of how our leaving certificate is adjudged.

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