Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

We were not twiddling our thumbs in 2014 and 2015. In 2015, before we entered the procurement process, we asked all stakeholders if they thought this was the right way to do it. The process is big and complex and there is a lot of taxpayers' money at stake. We identified exactly the technical and financial solutions we wanted from bidders following that engagement and our engagement with international experts. There was no other way of doing this and, having benchmarked against other projects in other sectors in Ireland and other broadband projects in Europe, we can say that no one has done such a project more quickly. The majority of PPP and other projects in this State take years because they are big and complex.

When one gets it wrong, it stalls it for many more years when cases are dragged through the courts. As the Deputy is aware, there are all those things to factor in when one is doing this. However, when one examines the information shown on slide 18 and when one reflects on what we have done in the past two years, I am personally confident that we could not have done anything any more quickly. We started out with 840,000 premises in 2014 that were not going to get high-speed broadband from the commercial sector. We are now at 540,000. I live in an amber area myself but I now see in my area of rural Wicklow that many people are now getting 500 Mbps from the 300,000 homes to which Eircom is now delivering. That is great news for them but it is not good news for me. I accept that, but where we are on this trajectory is at the top end of the curve, thank God. The scars of where we have been for the past two years are over us and we see the prize at the end of this coming by September. We have moved mountains to get to where we are. I hope there are not many more mountains to move. As programme director, I am absolutely confident that we have done everything possible. I agree that it was done by the book, but we have to do it by the book in order to ensure that it happens and that it does not get dragged through some other process down the line. We will deliver. That is the ultimate aim here. We will deliver by the end of September.

In terms of the other more detailed questions on procurement, without going into the procurement process and what the bidder is or is not doing - because there is a lot of confidential and commercially sensitive information in all of that so we could not disclose it - in the context of whether we have a detailed price, we must go back to the process here and what we got in September. In any procurement process with competitive dialogue, bidders give us what they call a dummy bid. We got that in September. It included more than 3,000 pages of stuff with huge models and everything else and our experts have spent October, November and December going through that. The bid included technical, financial and all the network information Mr. Neary and his engineers have been looking at for three months. The way the process works is that we have now given them substantial reports, although not as much in paper, from financial, technical and legal advisers in terms of what we would like to see them do better, where we think they could be more efficient and all those sorts of things one goes through in competitive dialogue in order to ensure the State gets the best outcome. They have only got that in the past couple of weeks. They now need to go and recalibrate those models, recalibrate their solutions and then come back into us.

There will not be a final price until we are happy that we have the right solution, namely, the right solution for the State, and that it will be done as fast as possible, which brings me back to the timeline and whether it has a timeline. We might have been given a timeline and we might have gone back and said we are not happy with it and that we want it done faster and we want it to look at that. That is what one does in competitive dialogue. For example, we ask how onecan get a faster provision in County Clare or County Wicklow or what else could be done more quickly, even if it costs a bit more money. We are going through all that with the consortium to see how we can get the job done as quickly as possible between 2019 and whatever end date. Our time plus is time plus minus because we want to get the work done as quickly as possible. That is product we are dealing with.