Mr. Liam Duggan:

In terms of cost, it is for every business to decide whether it sees a benefit in the system because not all businesses will benefit in the same way. I take issue with the position of the FTAI. I also take some responsibility. We have an engagement in which we are meeting various stakeholders, of which Mr. Allen is in charge. We have met people, but perhaps some of the communication was not at the level it should have been. In the case of the FTAI which predominantly represents British-based carriers, its expectation was that the code would be similar to the system in place in the United Kngdom, where it is a cluster based system that does not identify individual addresses but clusters of, typically, 12 to 25 addresses. Because of the uniqueness of the situation in Ireland with rural addresses, that system simply would not work. The expectation of the FTAI is one thing, but what we are delivering is something else. In addition, what it describes in terms of sequencing solves a problem that we do not have - finding addresses in urban areas - but does not solve a problem that we do have, namely, finding addresses in rural areas. What we have done since representatives the FTAI appeared before the committee two weeks ago is engage with each individual member of the FTAI, the larger members, to explain the issues we have encountered, what we are trying to achieve and how the system will work. The process is ongoing. I think it is fair to say the engagement has been very positive and that there is now a better understanding of what we are doing, as opposed to what was the case.

Costs are down to individual businesses in the sense of whether they find a benefit in using the system.

If it is a small business with 100 customers, it is probably best to wait until a customer makes contact again and then collect the Eircode from it as opposed to buying the database because at that level it is probably not of significant benefit. As the owners of a small business in a rural area know where their customers are, they do not have the same challenges as a bigger business. A large business that may want to undertake a geospatial analysis, for instance, has a very different set of requirements, but if a small business wants to access the information, there will be a number of products of offer. It is not just a single database with includes all of the information. One product will be a simple database containing the addresses and the Eircodes. Another will include the addresses, the Eircodes and the GPS co-ordinates. Not all businesses require them but some do.

We have also built an alias file because people represent their address differently. That is a topic about which we could talk for a long time, but I will not do so. However, aliases are key in addressing the question of matching.

We will have a number of products. We have not yet finalised the pricing with the Department, but they will be priced either on a per user basis in terms of the number of people on a computer screen within an organisation who access the data or on a per transaction basis, namely, the number of records they look up. If a small business is using the system, it will probably do so on a per transaction basis. We are talking about cent per transaction, not euro - probably less than 10 cent per transaction. If a small business has a requirement to look up 100 addresses in a month, typically it will pay about €10. That is the level we are talking about. If a very big business wants access to all 2.2 million addresses and the other information available such as district electoral division, DED, areas or small areas, it will pay significantly more, but it will gain the benefit of it. It will be up to each business to engage in its own cost benefit analysis and if it believes there is value to be had, it will buy it, as happens in the case of any other service, including software for which people buy software licences and so on. It is down to the individual business to engage in its own cost benefit analysis, but for a small business, we are talking small, not large, amounts of money.