Ms Carolan Lennon:

Last October, we announced a decision to bring our contact centres back in-house, having been outsourced to external service providers for longer than I have been in Eir and to close our contact centre in Dublin where we could not retain staff because there are so many job choices. We did that and we have now set up rural hubs in Sligo, Limerick and Cork. Certainly when we were transitioning from the outsourced provider, we had extremely long call answering and waiting times. We launched the centre in Sligo, which I visited last week. Waiting times are back to 90 seconds. I apologise profusely to customers but I believe the long-term strategy of having people who look after our customers working for us is right. Unfortunately, when one closes a contact centre in Dublin, one cannot expect people to hang around until one has other centres ready to go in Sligo, Limerick and Cork. It has been really unfortunate but I believe we are back on track now and it is the right way forward.