Mr. Noel Waters:

A very significant sum of money has been spent on this failed project on behalf of the taxpayer. As Accounting Officer for the Department, I greatly regret that. I greatly regret that public funds have been used in that manner. As I said in my statement, this has a long history. Ultimately when the Department and the Probation Service engaged on this, they relied on legal advice and the advice of the Chief State Solicitor who indicated it was in order to sign the lease on the basis the planning permission was in order. At the time, the Comptroller indicated it was in order for us, that we were entitled to rely on that advice and we did. The process by which advice is given in these cases is that the vendor or leaseholder warrants that the planning is in order which he did in that particular instance. As far as we were concerned the planning was in order. We went to refurbish the property and we spent about €1.9 million doing that. At that point, some of the local people objected as they are entitled to. They notified the Dublin City Council planning office which in turn served us with an order to say we could not proceed. The actions followed from that. Ultimately we found ourselves in a situation in which we had a property with a 25-year lease period with a break period after ten years and an annual rent in the order of €300,000 which we could not use because of what happened. My predecessor decided at that point we should cease paying the rent because the State was already subject to expenditure which was nugatory. He also decided on foot of legal advice to seek to bring the leaseholder and the planning architect to account for having made a mis-statement. That process went ahead and ultimately it led to a situation in which our legal advice was that if it had gone to a full court hearing, we would have lost. I cannot entirely give our legal strategy here. We were left with a situation in which we could risk further taxpayer money going to court or get out of it.