Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister and Minister of State to the committee. The Minister spoke a number of times about the waste of €7 million of taxpayers' money and trying to account for it and holding people to account. Certainly the Arts Council had a huge role of responsibility in this. In terms of the €7 million, quite a bit of it was spent on two companies in particular, namely, Ergo and Codec. Ergo received €2.1 million and Codec received €1.9 million. When we go through the fine print, much of this seems to have been spent on quality assurance, testing of systems and maintenance support. Almost €1 million of the €1.2 million given to Ergo was spent on this. There is no IT system, so what quality assurance or what analysis was it doing on a system that did not exist? Why was the Arts Council not asking questions about this?