Mr. Jim Breslin:

I have said this before. If we had used an alternative, which was this was a project unlike anything the Irish health service has delivered before and, in fact, probably unlikely anything the Irish public sector has delivered before, but we are just going to use our normal routines, we would have rightly been criticised.

In and of itself, the construct of the development board is not one that would not work in any circumstances. What PwC says is that - I am improvising the language now - we put all our eggs in one basket. It was a well-resourced basket. It was professionally brought together but they were all in there. That meant that if the technical specifics were not caught at the development board, there was nothing else that was able to say that one needed to look at that further.

If I were doing it again, there would be pros and cons. When one puts layers over a body that is responsible for delivering something and second guesses it, one can slow things down and that can cost money. In the gateways, if we were to do this in this way again, I would want external eyes on it to properly give us subjective advice as we sought approvals for the next stage.