Mr. John McCarthy:

The loans are taken out by the local authorities. When taking out those loans they would have come to the Department looking for sanction. At that point, the sanction request would have been examined, but there would have been no commitment to the development of the sites until an actual project was brought forward. The loans remain with the local authorities. Anyway, in some respects the scheme was designed to recognise a moral obligation to the local authorities for the fact that they had purchased land with the intention of developing the sites with funding provided by the Department.