Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
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We actually built in a contingency on top of what we were asked to build for Military Road. We built in 20%.

The Deputy is suggesting that with some sort of crystal ball we should have built a building with perhaps seven or eight empty floors on top of it in the hope that at some stage in the future we might be able to occupy it. If we built a building that was 200% or 300% over the capacity the Accounting Officer for the accountable agency had asked us to build, I can only imagine the questions the committee would have. If the Office of Public Works had taken a design specification from an Accounting Officer, added 20% onto it but then decided it knew better and added on three or four more floors, negating the public spending code and all the gateways we referred to a while ago that we would have gone through, not only would we not have got planning permission for it, we would not have got financial approval for it. We got financial approval for what was requested by the Accounting Officer at the time to vacate Harcourt Square with a contingency built into it and that is what we built.