Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

I do not accept that we did not have a business plan. We did not have a single document business plan. We have provided all sorts of documentation, which the Comptroller and Auditor acknowledged in his report, and it contains most of the elements that would have been contained in a single business plan. However, it is fair to say it is not in a single document.

The point I was making about the history is incredibly important because in terms of risk and what might happen, few people in 2009 would necessarily have been able to foresee exactly what would happen over the following three to four years in terms of the general environment in society and, most particularly, its impact on the Department. That is quite apart from the project itself. In the first place, when we signed the contract in 2009, we envisaged absolutely that we would focus on this as a priority project over the following couple of years and would roll out public services cards but, in 2010, 2011 and 2012, our baseline activity changed out of proportion to anything we experienced previously. As a consequence, we had to prioritise providing income support service people over and above anything else we were doing. Additionally in 2010, the Government made a decision we would not have been privy to in 2009 to change the entire institutional infrastructure of the Department in respect of how we dealt with people of working age. We were required to integrate staff from the community welfare service and the employment services of FÁS and build a new business model and offering. This was an enormous organisational programme change that we could not have foreseen in 2009.

With regard to the project itself, there were difficulties. The company involved had to build a plant to effect production and, therefore, that phase of the project to see whether it could produce a card within time came on board. Our expectation was that in the initial stages, priority would be effected to giving the card to those entitled to free travel. That was to be the first offering because we wanted to replace the free travel card. As it happened, despite the goodwill and effort of ourselves and the National Transport Authority, NTA, there were delays in developing the infrastructure for the Leap card and so on, which meant the NTA was unable to integrate with our card. There were all these reasons-----