Mr. Maurice Mullen:

I made the point before the lunch break about why Dublin was equipped and developed and its current status. My colleague, Mr. Chris Reynolds, director, will deal with the questions that were posed about the equipment issues, including failure, in Valentia, and also the plans to re-equip Valentia. Malin has recently been completed and we intend to do the same in Valentia shortly. Mr. Reynolds will explain that point.

A series of questions were asked by Deputy Joe McHugh about the Fisher report. It was commissioned because under the current arrangements for dealing with appointments in the public service, the embargo prevents posts from being filled. However, in certain instances, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform will allow priority for posts of an urgent nature to be filled. To do that, one has to be able to show that every effort is being made to achieve value for money. In that context, we would not be able to continue filling posts, including the radio officers, etc., without having a full value for money report completed. That is under the Croke Park arrangements.

The second question was who commissioned the report and the answer is that the Department commissioned it. The third question was whether the Minister commissioned it and the answer is "No". The Department is responsible and the Secretary General is accountable for the deployment of resources on the ground in the Department. Obviously, therefore, the Department formally did the commissioning process.

The fourth question was when the report was commissioned. The answer is that it was commissioned just over a year ago. They started to work and effectively got into their stride towards the end of the summer, in the autumn period. The intention was to complete it sometime in or about the Christmas period.

A further question asked by Deputy McHugh was whether we are doing further analysis of what is going on at present and the answer to that is "Yes". As I indicated, we are still looking at all the different elements of responding to the two value for money reports. We consider that an integrated response is necessary. We felt we needed to look at other elements of how the stations operate to see if there were options that would allow us to operate them in a way which would give us the type of value for money demonstration that we need to be able to show. At the same time, are there other ways we could do that other than simply by what the consultants had to say? That is not to say that we accept or reject the consultants at this stage - it is simply to broaden the line of options that we may be able to pursue. We have asked the same consultants to examine a couple of additional matters. They are doing that at the moment and we expect them to come back to us in the next two to three weeks. That is the timeframe for that. In the meantime, we are continuing to look at this issue and all the other issues associated with the reports themselves.

I will now pass over to Mr. Reynolds to deal with a number of matters that were raised, including the Canadian model and others.