Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy is right on that. We are writing back to the Department on that specific issue.

The next item is No. 1968 from the Valuation Office and pertains to the Harold's Cross stadium. The Commissioner of Valuation has made it clear that there was no contact whatsoever with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine during the process of valuing Harold's Cross. We have to accept that. He put it clearly in black and white when he said it would be outside its remit and inappropriate to do so. We will note and publish that.

The next item is No. 1972, which was provided by BT at our meeting last week - it is a copy - where BT refers to the Analysys Mason report. We will publish correspondence No. 1972, which we dealt with last week. As I said, we have already acknowledged that the Analysys Mason report was published by the Department. We will publish it on our website as people will want to follow it through our website.

The next item of correspondence is No. 1973 from the Secretary General of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine stating there were no communications whatsoever between his office, and the Department, and the Valuation Office in relation to the sale of Harold's Cross stadium. We will note and publish this. The Department is saying there was no contact so we have to accept that.

The next item of correspondence is No. 1974 from Mr. Mark Griffin, Secretary General of the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment, which provides information on the legislative basis for amending the broadband tender, the decision to extract 300,000 households from the tender and the expert opinion relied on for this. We can note and we will publish this. I want to put that on our work programme as an item we want to deal with. I will make one comment about the letter that he actually sent to us. It is a detailed letter. We asked about the state aid issue. At this point in time we know there is only one tenderer still on the pitch - I will just call it that way - but it had not been formally categorised as the preferred tenderer at this point. We asked about state aid and I will quote from the second paragraph of page 6 of his letter:

A formal State aid notification has not yet been submitted to the EU Commission and a formal decision by the Commission in respect of the notified measure has not, therefore, been made, as this can only be done after preferred bidder stage of the procurement process.

In terms of the broadband issue, which we will come back to because I am putting it on the work programme, the state aid issue, the European Commission has not given its approval yet for this project because they got to see the details of the tender and the preferred bidder, and what is involved. So we are a little bit away, one way or the other. It still has to go to Europe after that stage. We will just park that and publish this because we want to deal with the broadband issue and the work programme in a few minutes.