Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Okay, that is fine. The total that the State has spent on MANs so far is €176 million. That was a piece of information given to us by the chief executive officer of Enet. The revenue share represents about 5% of a return over the past 15 years. When we discussed this previously, one of the reasons for not going to tender was because investments were being made by Enet and there was a return to the State which represents about 5% over 15 years, which is not a sizeable return.

The State was paid €8.8 million in revenue from 2004. It is not a huge amount of money. Looking at that and listening to Eir, which I accept is a commercial entity with a parallel fibre network, it was fully expecting to see a competitive process for the concession contracts and they were done earlier than anticipated. In hindsight, has the return to the State been sufficient that a competitive process was not required? Is it a question of how the Department handled the communication or is there something more than that?