Mr. Gerard Moran:

I have made a note of the questions and I will do my best to respond to them. I trust you will come back to me, Chairman, if you require more information on any of the questions. We understand the frustration on the issue and we are eager to get to the bottom of it. When an issue arises about petrol quality, the alarm bells go for us and we are concerned. There may be another explanation but it is certainly an indicator that there is potentially a fraud being perpetrated in terms of petrol. We are eager to get to the bottom of it.

As soon as we receive complaints, we visit every filling station that has been complained about and take samples. To date, over 180 samples have been taken and referred to the State Laboratory since the inception of this problem. The testing conducted by the State Laboratory is time consuming and quite complex because it tests for the presence of a whole range of different potential stretching agents or fuel abnormalities. That means testing takes time plus there is a great deal of samples and I am afraid I cannot give an average or fixed time. We are dealing with a spike in the volume of samples submitted and the nature of questions that must be asked.

Let me give a little background. We tend not to encounter petrol stretching very frequently. I have checked the situation in the past couple of days and the only case of petrol stretching anyone could recall was in Donegal, four or five years ago, where methanol was used. Petrol stretching is a rare enough occurrence and, as far as I am aware, it is not a prevalent practice in other jurisdictions. I am aware of newspaper reports of a particular incident in Bournemouth. It was discovered that a Tesco filling station had contaminated fuel but I do not know what type and up to 100 cars were damaged. I am unaware of a similar phenomenon to ours happening recently in another jurisdiction.