Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

During the course of the meeting, no substantive figures were presented to support some of the charges being made. There was a certain degree of upheaval in the introduction of this new system, which was essentially built from a brand new platform. There have been three outages of the national lottery system, which suggests a technological problem. Some people argue that broadband is vastly superior to wireless but it is not. Wireless broadband operates all over the country and it is 100% reliable. As a system, wireless works. An issue clearly arises in regard to what is going on but we have not managed to get to the nub of the technology problems. When there are three failures in a short space of time, there is clearly a problem. It was not just a fall of snow in Spain; something else must also have happened.

My questions are for the regulator as much as for Premier Lotteries Ireland. Is there a problem with the system itself or somewhere else that we should know about? I will not get into the other arguments that have been made because I am sure if I gave the witnesses sufficient time to respond they could debunk all of them but nobody has yet explained to me why we had three outages and what has gone wrong. What are we going to do about it in the future?