Mr. Tom Costello:

There was a great deal of interrogation of it. Ultimately, there are different criteria as to whether it is a balanced bid. If a contractor decides he is going to provide a square metre of block work at 10% cheaper than the competition, it is very hard to tell him that he cannot do that, or he might say that because he does not have enough work he is taking a 5% reduction on the project overall. The reality is that contractors such as BAM and the other bidders are professional companies. They would have put several hundred thousands of euro worth of work into preparing the bid. At the end of the day, the bill of quantities was presented in a very professional format. The bids came in during August 2016 and we only finally got through the assessment in March 2017. A period of six months went into the quality and price assessment. Unless one had very clear grounds, one would end up in court for two or three years if a contractor decided he had not been treated fairly. In this case, from a quality and price point of view the tender was professional, as it was for the four bidders.