Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Griffin, Mr. Colgan and their officials. I thank the Northern Ireland Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee in Northern Ireland for hosting us in Stormont a number of weeks ago to discuss the project. It is shocking reading all of this material in that it sets almost the gold standard for management incompetence and project and oversight failure. From the beginning, there was a litany of flags being raised and problems arising but none the less cheques were written and money was paid out. It is so broad across every aspect of the project, it leads one to question what was going on and whether there were ulterior motivations. If one looks at it from the beginning, a company with no track record in delivering this kind of project with a balance sheet of almost nil fails to win a project and yet a month later, is re-evaluated and wins a project. It engages with Aurora Telecom on the basis of the letter of offer, it fails and Aurora Telecom pulls out. It goes in with another company and the entire nature of the project changes but nobody on the department side changes any of the consequences. We see a bill issued for €1.3 million for equipment worth €30,000 which was bought from a sister company of the company concerned. This was never used in the project and yet we see further cheques being written.

A whistleblower comes forward in 2006 and the department in Northern Ireland says there is nothing to be seen here. Another whistleblower comes forward in 2008 and eventually, we start to see some movement. However, while that is going on, the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources is not told about that second issue. However, it failed to attend a meeting in 2006 with the whistleblower, at the invitation of DETI, to talk to them about their concerns. Mr. Colgan's organisation, the SEUPB, is not told until 2010 that there are problems and must then be the body to instigate a forensic assessment of the project to discover the real detail of what was going on instead of the departments involved. Is there any sense that this is more than just a failure in governance and that there was some form of corruption or bad influence on the part of the company and possibly people in the department in Northern Ireland?