Mr. Mark Griffin:

Let me try to deal with some of the issues that the Deputy raised. For the benefit of the committee and others who are watching, this is a large-scale, complex, public-private ICT project. We simply had to ensure that it was resourced quickly and with the right skill sets. I am referring to people with experience of stakeholder management, outreach, complex communication projects and management of complex public-private IT projects. The issue that we discussed a few minutes ago related to the encoding of public sector databases. Some 80 million records across approximately 20 bodies were to be encoded. It was important that we had someone in place who had experience of operating at a senior level with Departments and the networking capacity to get the job completed within a relatively short period.