Mr. John Barry:

We made a submission to the Department in January 2012 before we were asked to carry out this task. Certainly, embedded in that submission clearly was the fact that we had certain competencies and skills as a utility but we would have to rely on external service providers to build the technology for us and to write the processes for us. That would be standard in any task of this magnitude. When an organisation is building such systems and making them go live it needs external service providers. It is very technical.

I believe the word "consultants" is a misnomer. These are service providers, technical experts, process engineers, software engineers and so on. I am making the point clearly and upfront that we simply would not have had the capability within Bord Gáis Energy to deliver such systems on such a scale in the timeframe delivered.