Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

My recollection of that particular day is that not only was there no contrition from Mr. Lynch or Mr. Coveney about this multimillion euro disaster, but they were, in fact, bullish. They were bullish to the point of actually looking at all of us on the committee and saying: "You guys, in the previous autumn, had actually encouraged musicals. Sure we were only doing what you were asking us to do. That is why we got ourselves involved in this particular production, and that RTÉ was supporting Irish musicals." Mr. Bakhurst has just said that he personally did not think that this production was right, so I checked some of the transcripts.

In January last year, Mr. Coveney said to this committee about the production:

There are several factors that go into something like this. It is not something we decided on a whim; it is a project that was in gestation for nearly three years ... We are very proud of it.

He said things were not decided on a whim. Let us examine that. In the Irish Independentthis morning, as has been noted, the writer charged with creating the original drafts of the script, Lisa Tierney-Keogh, has written an article saying she was hired on 13 April 2022 with the instruction to have four drafts of the show done before that August. That is four drafts in less than four months, a timeframe she described as bonkers. The contract was signed six days later, on 19 April, when she was hired. There was no script in place, only an idea, and no theatrical analysis, from a performance point of view, of whether the show could be a success. The ordinary people working on the show knew it was a hare-brained scheme, yet Mr. Lynch and Mr. Coveney sat at the committee in January last year and defended it to the point of telling us they would be booking a second instalment of the show for Christmas 2023. Why did Mr. Lynch sit here in January last year and not interject as Mr. Coveney defended what was clearly evidence of financial disaster?