Mr. Noel Waters:

I acknowledged that at the beginning. I am not in anyway seeking to minimise the expenditure of taxpayers' money on this issue. It is worth repeating that had the financial crisis not happened there would now be a prison facility in Thornton Hall. Whether it would have been a public-private partnership or a direct build is a matter of conjecture, but there would be a prison facility there.

I will deal with several of the points and ask my colleagues to come in on the others. The Deputy mentioned the budget had increased from €150 million to more than €500 million. There has been some correspondence on this figure. The figure of €150 million first emerged as a placeholder in a capital envelope for the entire justice family prepared for the Department in conjunction with the Department of Finance. It was produced even before the site in Thornton Hall was bought. It was solely a placeholder budget for a prison that was intended to be produced at some point. At the time, capital envelopes ran for three years, and had we not put a figure in the envelope we would have had no money and we would have gone nowhere on developing a prison. The motivation of the people doing this was the revolving door situation and the terribly bad conditions in Mountjoy Prison, which the Deputy mentioned. The figure was a placeholder budget and was never intended to be indicative of what the cost of developing Thornton Hall might have been. We simply would not have known that.