Mr. Mark Griffin:

We have been dealing with this intensively since 2015. We went out and consulted on it and, interestingly, Eir, which was before the committee last week, supported a gap funded model. We then did a project reappraisal in 2018 when we were down to one bidder. A comprehensive review was done from the ground up as to whether the gap funded model was the right way to go, from both a financial and non-financial perspective. The answer was "Yes". We covered this in our previous submission. The key piece in ensuring the effectiveness of the gap funded model is putting the protections Mr. Mulligan referred to in place in the contract . Those include the claw-back provisions and provisions for future-proofing and so on, and having strong governance mechanisms in place in the Department to oversee it. One thing that struck me about the intervention by the two academics from the University of Limerick was the way in which they drew comparisons with public private partnership, PPP, projects. The PPP sector in Ireland delivers projects or services traditionally provided by the public sector, with assets reverting to the State.

We are in a space where we are looking at how to provide services in areas that are not served by the commercial sector but for a technology that is traditionally provided by that sector and where the public sector has to step in and provide a subsidy. One is comparing apples and oranges to a certain extent. I understand, of course, that this is one of the issues that people have found quite perplexing and we have dealt with it comprehensively in the original documents that we put forward all the way through the analysis when Eir dropped out and we were left with a single bidder. We asked KPMG to talk to us about whether the arrangement still stands up in a single bidder solution and if it does, what are the additional protections we need to layer on top of that to ensure the State gets value for money and that it is fully protected in the investment that it makes.