Mr. Joe Tierney:

I have a newsagents, Tierney's Newsagents in Navan. We are the oldest family newsagents in the country. We have been proud national lottery agents since the inception of the national lottery some 28 years ago. The outage of service last month was the first time that had happened in 28 years. It has been well documented that this was the first time the national lottery had to cancel a draw. The old regime used broadband and we had no issues.

The national lottery has full confidence in the wireless free system as a suitable system and that it moves from the strongest signal each time. The national lottery, however, had the perfect storm of a new system, machines and terminals that the agents and staff were not familiar with and an outage of Telefónica in Spain that brought down all of the wireless system in Spain for two hours. The national lottery delegates will explain when they come before the joint committee why it took nine hours rather than two hours for our terminals to work. This led to major issues in stores with people having to come back a few times. Eventually the lottery took the correct decision to move the draw to the following day and give everybody a second bite of the cherry or to those people who had not got a chance to buy a ticket.

There is no question but that there are current teething issues with the new system but after 27 years of the one system and 20,000 parts that have gone into 3,800 stores across the county that would be expected. The main time we would have expected a problem was on 30 November when the changeover happened, but that was pretty much a seamless operation. Since that there have been a number of outages, each for different reasons and the lottery said as recently as last week that other issues may come down the line and that they cannot categorically state they will not be other issues. Part of the problem is down to the newness of the system and the adaptability of being able to fix it as quickly as they would have been to fix the broadband service. Change brings its own problems.

Mr. Jennings alluded to the National Lottery Users Council, a council that was set up 15 years ago, which invites two members from the CSNA, NFRN, RGDATA and the Postmasters' Union to meet with the lottery on at least three occasions a year. Since the advent of the changeover we have met monthly for the past seven months. At all times the national lottery has kept us very well informed of the procedure on a month by month basis, have come back and asked us for our views and in most cases have implemented what we as agents and those operating the machines are observing and would like to see changed.