Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

I will go back to my first point. The Deputy made a valid point about monitoring the number of 300,000 with Eir. In the next ten, 15 or 20 years there may be a small proportion that Eir will not connect for whatever reason.

Under the NBP, there is a commitment to connect everyone in Ireland if a connection is required and a commercial company will not do it. Our 540,000 figure has a plus or minus in the contract to allow for the fact that there may be premises over the next ten years that commercial companies told us they will connect but might not do so.