Ms Katherine Licken:

Under the public spending code, there are very clear roles and responsibilities designated to the different parties to these investments. The Department is the approving authority, the relevant national cultural institution is the sponsoring agency and the OPW is the contracting authority. If something goes wrong, the committee will have us back before it and, perhaps, the OPW as the contracting authority. We are very conscious of that. It has to be borne in mind that some of these projects are old buildings so there is always the risk of finding something that was not anticipated. For that reason the public spending code and the capital works framework allows to us to have a phase of investigation work. That is ongoing at the National Library at present. It is a detailed investigation. Once we have cleared the books out of the site we have contractors to go in and carry out a detailed investigation of what is there, the conditions there and what difficulties are likely to arise. That is before one goes to detailed planning and contracting, so one can get a better estimate of the cost.