Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

At the time, we did not believe it would have a detrimental impact on subsidy and I am not saying it did. There were many other aspects of the bidding process for bidders that resulted in the subsidy going up, not just the 300,000 premises. What the ESB said was that bidders, including Eir, had to redesign their network. That took months to complete because Eir had already spent a year designing the network for the 757,000 premises. There is no doubt that the removal of the 300,000 premises complicated what was an already complicated process.