Mr. Ger Cowhig:

As for the consultants, obviously we must package it in such a way that it also brings economies of scale for Irish Water, that is, there is enough work there for us to be able to get a good price for it.

Second, regardless of whether it is IBM or Accenture, a lot of Irish people are working for those companies inside the Irish Water programme. It brings a lot of good experience for those people to continue developing further business in Ireland. These people are Irish people, it sustains jobs in Ireland and that works very well. On the smaller scale, we have a lot of panels that allow a lot of small businesses and single-person enterprises to get work in the Irish Water programme. It has been a fact of the programme that many small businesses have got work from it and have benefited from it. My response to the Deputy is that the manner in which we package the bigger chunks of the work is for economies of scale but we make room for the smaller players and there is room for them in the way we have packaged it.