Mr. Kevin Bakhurst:

I have not thought about it through that prism. The 105 recommendations of those two expert committee reports, which we are implementing and reporting to the Department on their implementation, should ensure this never happens again. The way things were done within RTÉ at that time contributed to the lack of knowledge across other members of the executive. The communication between the executive and the then board was not good enough. We have been addressing all those things anyway and some of them are recommendations in the reports. Those recommendations will go a long way to ensuring issues like this one are as avoidable as possible.

It was before my time and I am not making excuses. As I have said previously, it is very unfortunate to write off, in effect, more than €3 million of public money. However, big projects, particularly big IT projects, can go wrong. What I have looked at is how the organisation tried to salvage that, what lessons were learned from it and how to ensure, looking at the Ernst & Young report, we are operating to best practice, as set out in that report. That is what we are doing now. Would having that in place previously have stopped this from happening? I do not know because projects can go wrong-----