Mr. Denis O'Leary:

What has happened in Mitchelstown has happened in every other town in the country. The red lines represent the main roads out of Mitchelstown and in the middle is Mitchelstown itself. All the houses in the middle already have high-speed broadband through fibre to the cabinet or fibre to the exchange, so they are not in the intervention area. While we had 775,000 homes, all the homes along the red lines were in the subvention area.

For the 300,000 customers, Eir has removed from the intervention area all those on the red lines and will connect them on a commercial basis. Our equipment is in Mitchelstown. If we have to reach the homes in the intervention area, we must now go through all the red lines without fibre but we cannot pick up any customers because they are no longer in the intervention area. In effect, Eir has put a doughnut around each town, our equipment is in the middle of the doughnut, and all our customers are on the other side of the doughnut. We must go through the doughnut in every case to get to the intervention customers.

I want to be careful. I am not accusing Eir of anything. It made a commercial decision to take 300,000 customers out of the intervention area and indicated it would connect them on a commercial basis. From our understanding, that was perfectly correct and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent 300,000 people who had never had high-speed broadband from getting it. We had done 12 or 14 months of hard work on a good, technical design and case study but found we would have to start again. That was the impact of the 300,000 customers.