Kate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Mr. Pollock's background is in the construction industry. Would it be fair to say by BAM being on site, having knowledge of the site and having intimate contact with the design teams on the project, that it was at a fairly significant advantage when it came to tendering for phase B in the sense that if one was another building contractor, it would not make any sense to go onto a site that somebody was already on, with hoardings and cranes and having cleared the site? What I am saying is that it was de factodecided that when BAM was awarded contract phase A that no other contractor would bother tendering for phase B because it would not have had the intimate knowledge of the site and it would, therefore, have been at a disadvantage. Let us be realistic here. Who was going to come in and build a building on top of a substructure built by another company? What if it fell down? Who would be to blame, the lad to build the bottom bit or the lad who built the top bit? It is very strange that there would be one contractor on site and that one would then empty the site and allow another one onto it. What I am getting at here is competition. There might be a competition element here because BAM had access to information that other did not have because they were not on site.