Mr. John Barry:

Before I come to the bid document, I want to remind the committee what has been achieved here. Bord Gáis got a letter asking us to carry out this task in April 2012. In approximately 18 months we stood up a national utility and all that goes with that. Therefore a lot of planning went into the first 12 weeks. I brought this document with me and will happily put this on the record if the Chairman wants me to do so. That is our scoping document, which is about 800 pages long. It goes into enormous detail about what we have to do concerning systems, organisation and timelines. A huge amount of planning went on. That document was, in turn, shared with our service providers because we wanted them to understand what they were bidding on when they put in their tender prices.

We developed that and put it into the bid documents, so that when the service providers engaged with them on a contractual basis they knew exactly what they had to deliver. I can assure the committee that only for that rigour and discipline we would not have achieved what we did in the 18 months. That is the answer to the first question.

As regards the timeline and increased costs, I would argue the other way. The fact that the timeline was defined, clear and concise has reduced the cost enormously. It has forced us as an entity developing it - as well as forcing our service providers and other parties - to make decisions.

Let us not forget that in the course of that timeline we have engaged with 34 local authorities, negotiated a service level agreement with them individually and produced annual service plans, which is an enormous task. The money invested in our systems is open for scrutiny. The bulk of our systems went live on 6 January. We are now procuring for the Irish Water systems in eight local authorities goods and services that were procured last year on their own. We are starting to open up the capital projects in our systems in all capital offices. That, in turn, will lead to the ultimate savings described by Mr. Tierney. The level of planning and detail that went into this was enormous. As someone with experience, I would not have done this without that level of planning. The money was invested correctly.