Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

It is worth remembering that the public service broker was an innovative concept that was adopted by Government in 2000 as an approach worth trying. Nothing of its kind existed anywhere at the time. Consequently, the project to build it was also, of necessity, a project with significant research elements and because there were no comparators, it was virtually impossible to estimate its possible cost with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

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