Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 16 April 2015

Public Accounts Committee

Special Report 90 of the Northern Ireland Audit Office and the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General
The Bytel Project

10:00 am

Photo of Joe CostelloJoe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

That is the point. Once Aurora pulled out, as Mr. Griffin said, the project had fundamentally changed but no new letter of offer was presented. If there was a fundamental change in the terms of the project, why were the alarm bells not going off? Why is it that somebody in the Department or, indeed, somebody in the SEUPB, would not insist that the new terms were reflected in a letter of offer to the new participants, or that there was not a reappraisal of the situation to ensure the new participants were doing the job they were supposed to be doing? They did not do the job they were supposed to be doing. They came down from Belfast to Dublin but they also went off to Tyrone, Donegal and Derry, which was not part of the contract that was given to Bytel. Surely somebody should have seen there was need for a fresh letter of offer and that we were facing a fundamentally different situation with a new partner, Eircom UK. That seems to me to be at the nub of the problem and where everything goes wrong. There was no appraisal, no supervision, no oversight and nobody recognising that the project had fundamentally changed. In retrospect, the witnesses are now agreeing to that. Why did that happen?

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