Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Clearly the Department was involved. It made decisions at various points in time. It reviewed the options that were available and so on. There is merit in a fairly detailed look-back at how the Department dealt with this project going back right to the assessment of the business case at the beginning. The thing that strikes me, and I am not sure it is clear, is that until very recently there was no money other than public money involved in this as far as I could see.

The idea of then trying to run a project where there is no other investment - nobody else has skin in the game - takes away a fundamental control that one might expect to be there. A private sector developer, or even a voluntary body which has done fundraising of its own to put towards the project, will know what money is worth and would be much more careful about the spending of it.