Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications

Caller Helpline: Samaritans Ireland and Telecommunications and Internet Federation

9:30 am

Mr. Pat Galvin:

I will address the cost issue. If a corporation approached us to organise a freefone service for a promotion or a sales-type initiative and such a volume of calls was made, that amount is what we would be billing the corporate entity for the service. It is the rate card for that volume of calls and represents the forgone revenue that the industry has agreed will not be billed back to the Samaritans. The construction of that figure comprises a complex selection of internal transfer costs with, for example, us in eircom. Without getting too technical, we manage the service. A call may originate with Vodafone or another mobile operator and we pay that operator for taking the call across its network and terminating it in our network. The billable figure based on those costs is €700,000 per annum rather than for the two-year period. That is the current estimate.

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