Mr. Dermot Griffin:

Many of Senator Coghlan's questions relate to the transition programme. I will give an outline of what was involved in the changeover. The challenge the national lottery faced, which no other business faces, is that it operates with particular technology and systems and processes and, overnight, had to switch over to new technology and systems and keep the business running right through to operate a draw that evening. We had to run the An Post national lottery company up to 29 November, when we had a lotto draw. On Sunday 30 November we had to turn on new systems, a new Internet system and a new website, and take ticket sales from 8.15 that morning. We had to do this with the assistance of our agents, who had a great deal to do. We had to take all the An Post national lottery company scratch cards out of the retail network and load in new scratch cards and sell them. We held our first draw, our Daily Million draw, on that Sunday night. We did that successfully.

A requirement of the licence was to ensure that for 90 days from the ending of the An Post national lottery company we had a facility to allow players claim any outstanding prizes they had on their An Post national lottery company tickets and claim them in the retail network for a further 90 days. We had to install the new systems and co-locate them in retail outlets with the existing system. There is limited space in a typical retail outlet. We had to put in plinths to make it possible for the agent to use one machine to cash prizes from the old licence and a new machine to produce tickets and validate payments from the new licence. That is a big logistical exercise, hence the 20,000 pieces of equipment that had to be co-ordinated. To facilitate the claiming of prizes, the ticket checkers, which are independent pieces of equipment, were connected to the old GTech terminals. We had to facilitate the payments by leaving them in place.

Another challenge we faced in the transition - this was clear from the retailers, and we took it on board - was that the Christmas period is the most important time for retailers, and we had to minimise any disruption to our retailers over that Christmas period. That is why we placed so much emphasis on the planning and training, and we involved the agent council in that because we knew it was a big exercise. After 90 days of that new operation, we have completed 72 million transactions successfully. The systems have been available more than 99% of the time. We then had to collect the old An Post national lottery company scratch cards. We have collected millions of them and had to decommission them and credit the agents.

Over the past few months the management and staff of the national lottery have been, in effect, running down one company and running another one. We flagged up in advance that this would be a challenging period. No other business would change all its systems overnight. They might change the terminal and then separately change the mainframe and then the telecommunications. The requirement of the licence was to change everything in one go. We achieved that. There have been some outages, and some of these were out of our control because the Telefónica network in Spain fell over and brought down its backup. That was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Companies such as Sony and Amazon do not use a service such as that if it is not reliable and dependable. A storm affected the network there. It brought down the link between the primary system and the backup system in Spain and, in the attempt to re-route traffic so that the backup would still be in place, an erroneous code was sent to the primary system, which brought that down too. That was the problem in Spain, a really rare event for a big telecommunications operator.