Mr. Peter Finnegan:

It was an OSCE conference. Ireland has been a member of the OSCE for 50 years and we have never held a conference in Dublin for the OSCE. They came to us in 2019 asking us to host one of their big meetings. There was a meeting in the autumn every year. Our own delegation was at that time led by former Deputy Michael Creed and was supportive of hosting an event in Dublin. People love coming to Dublin for conferences as you would expect. It is good, reputationally, for the country. All this happened around 2019. We did our assessment. The conference attracts about 400 people. Break-out rooms, security and so on are required. At that stage only one venue was actually capable of taking a conference of that scale, and that was the convention centre. Then Covid-19 hit and the conference, which was due to take place in 2021, was postponed to 2024. If we were doing a conference such as that now, there would be more venues available to us. We would do a procurement whereby we would go out to all those venues, obtain prices and choose the most economically advantageous tender. That conference was of its time.