Joanna Byrne (Louth, Sinn Fein)

What I am trying to get at is how we ended up here in the first place. Answering questions at a previous meeting of this committee in 2018, the then Chairman, Maurice Buckley, said the OPW went into this in good faith because everybody on the board of ICML was a person of good standing - I think that was the term used. Questions have to be asked as to how a consortium like this extracted a commitment from the State without providing any shred of evidence for the project's feasibility or demonstrating its ability to deliver, fit out, manage and run such an enterprise. Was it that the then board of the OPW was particularly impressed by the consortium? Was there intimidation of their good standing and repercussions if they did not proceed? I am trying to tease out why the agreement was entered into in the first place.