Mr. Feargal Ó Coigligh:

In relation to the review of the original business case, anyone involved, including myself has questions to ask. Senator Noonan was a former Minister of State, Senator Noonan and I was in his previous Department for five years. I was there at the very beginning, so I went back to the original documentation and looked at the business case.

The business case speaks in very confident terms about putting in place a project manager and delivering a steering group. It looks fine to someone like myself without the ICT expertise. I said that it was under control, when clearly it was not. I did not have an appreciation of this at the time. Our Department did not have the ICT expertise, because I think the highest grade person in the Department was at HEO level. We were struggling to service our own needs. Our own internal ICT project looked at it and had a few questions but thought that it made sense. The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, OGCIO, looked at it again. With the benefit of hindsight, all of us should have looked at it more closely, not just in terms of the ambition, because we all support the ambition and the system is still needed, but in terms of skills needed to deliver it. That is what we did not interrogate sufficiently at the time.