Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate all of that. I just wanted to look at the figures because I know time will be against me here.

I have raised the issue of retroactive recapitalisation umpteen times with the Minister and we will probably have the same debate about it now. I was involved in negotiations at St. Andrews and have been on the fringes of other negotiations and I know how a lot of this works. I know there are both informal and formal contacts. As I listened to the Minister talk about side meetings and so forth, I was thinking about sending one's children to school. One does not wait until 1 September to decide which school one's children will attend. The application process opened today or will open within the next 48 hours, but it seems to me that the Minister is telling this committee that none of this work has begun yet. No informal contact has begun and the Minister has not spoken to anyone to ask how this process would work. It is not as if they were waiting on anything. There is no new information available as a result of the doors opening today. This reinforces my conviction that the Government has given up hope on this issue. Can the Minister say anything to this committee to suggest there has been work ongoing to determine how this process will work? Is there some type of documentation or analysis done within the Department so that if we get positive signals - the right type of wink and nod from our friends in Brussels - an application will be ready to be processed? Is any of this happening or is this just a game of drag-this-out?