Ms Carolan Lennon:

The Deputy asked, if the scenario were to change and we were back in it, how long it would take us to get up and running. It would take the minimum of a year to come up with another way of doing this and to get the ducks in a row to get started on it. In terms of any involvement we would have in future in rolling out in rural Ireland, we would be leveraging our 300,000 bills, the additional fibres that are in place and the additional connection points. That means we could get going from that point. In terms of going to all those exchanges, we have fibre backhauls to many of those exchanges. That can be a big chunk of work but we have done a lot of that already as part of our rural 300,000 roll-out. Unfortunately, coming up with a new model and getting people around the table does not happen as quickly as many of us would like it to happen.

On the duplication of wholesale, currently, our wholesale team sells our network throughout the country. The idea would be that we would have a separate wholesale team. We did not discuss separate buildings but having a line between them and that they would be the only people allowed to sell in the intervention footprint. For example, the IFA is a customer of ours. Its farmers are among the 300,000. A chunk of them are in the intervention footprint and there are some in the suburban areas. We offer an overall service to them with an account manager who does all of that for them. In this new model, some of them would have been looked at in the new wholesale division, which looks after the intervention area, while some of them would have been looked at as part of the 300,000. Offering that customer an all-country solution, which we do today, was going to be a challenge, never mind the cost. The other bidders did not have that. They did not have established wholesale businesses like ours so they did not have that loophole to get through.

We did have some difficulties with licences for councils. We have about 315,000 homes today. We have not delivered to some of the original 300,000 we signed off with the Department. They will be delivered over the summer, but much of that was to do with way leaves and licences. I believe we got some unreasonable requests. One council would not give us some way leaves until we finished work it wanted us to do in an urban area, even though it was about a rural piece or whatever. That is an issue. Some are better than others. Some move matters on-----