Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I do not believe that the Data Protection Commissioner's points undermine my report. It was not commenting directly on whether my report was reliable or not. I think there is a bit of quoting out of context. In the report in 2016, the team went through the process of looking at the elements that should be in a good business case. It looked at documents compiled between 2003 and 2011. We found that there were many elements there but there were some key ones that were missing. I do not think it would be fair to characterise what we presented in the report as saying that that is as good as a business case. It is not. The conclusions of my report on that explain what a good business case is. I refer to the fact that the Accounting Officer was of the view that it was not possible to build a single detailed business case. While it had not been developed, the project has been coherently planned and implemented. The Data Protection Commissioner was challenging the Accounting Officer's view, not mine.