Mr. John Conlon:

The C and AG's report sets out a good timeline for this. A lot of it goes back to the early 2000s, when two Departments were involved in the promotion of the project, with one of them heavily involved, namely, the then Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. It is fair to say that Department drove the project over the period from 2003 to 2008. The OPW would have been involved as a contracting authority. At that stage, a lot of that was driven because of that Department's interest in science research and promotion.

The crash came in 2008 and people walked away at that stage as a sponsoring authority. Unfortunately, the OPW made a very ill-advised decision in 2003 to ignore legal advice and has been caught on the hook from a legal perspective since. I cannot stand over that and I find it very hard to explain it.