Mr. Aodhán Mac Cormaic:

We have to realise there are public tendering processes with which we and the committee must comply. We have had to comply with them and that creates its own difficulties in dealing with what is an extremely small market when one goes to tender for these ferry services. In some cases, islands have only one potential tenders, or possibly two. If there are two, the tender competitions potentially put one out of business for five years during the term of the contract. Therefore, anything to do with island transport services is extremely emotive and gets island communities extremely exercised. That does not detract from the fact that there are no exemptions for us from using public tendering procedures. That can create a difficulty. The other difficulty is that when one is dealing with a very small market, one has to leave the tender conditions and the conditions to be complied with as open as possible in order to encourage competition. If we were to have specified that a vessel could not be older than ten years, for example, the likelihood is that we would have got no tenders for that service. Where would we have been left then given our obligation to provide what is a lifeline service to the islands? We have to take these points into account. There is nobody questioning that we went through a valid tendering process.