Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

On European Commission rules, what is before me is a legal document. It is the state aid guidelines which are thrown at us in reference to this or that paragraph. The Directorate-General for Competition, DG COMP, case team was unambiguous in its view on a commercial investment. We have criteria for accepting commercial investments and taking commitment agreements on same. Eir came forward with all of them.

We had a difficult but a very good engagement on the commitment agreement, which landed in April 2017. When the commitment agreement was signed, we had no option. We also consulted ComReg which, under state aid guidelines, is to be consulted on the map. To be honest, this is not unique to Ireland. It has happened across Europe that one intervention was expected and the goalposts shifted. It happened in many local areas in the United Kingdom and it is happening in France and Italy. That is the nature of what we are involved in here. Commercial operators can make decisions in any given week and we have to deal with them. We are still dealing with them as we speak in that commercial operators may make announcements or put out press releases. Ultimately, however, we went through a rigorous process with Eir. We got what we believe was a robust commitment agreement under the circumstances where we could not avoid removing these properties from the intervention area. When I attended the press conference in April 2017, we were fully aware that the likely impact on the process would be to make it more difficult.