Mr. Mark Griffin:

The first question I would ask the Senator about that would be the basis for doing that. Eir withdrew and it is very clear from what it said, both in evidence to the committee and the letter sent to the Department and committee, that what it was submitting was not to be considered as a proposal. It was to be regarded as an hypothetical assessment of what could be done if a range of conditions applied.

I see no reason whatsoever, frankly, to even discuss that.

The second point echoes what we said in our document. If we go back to scratch, we have to go back to the initiation of a public procurement process. We got legal advice on that when it was mooted that perhaps we could assign the project to ESB, a commercial semi-State company. The legal advice was unambiguous. My interpretation is that if we start talking about a dominant player in the market then the legal advice becomes even stronger because we have an economic undertaking in a dominant position in the telecommunications market. We cannot go back in and negotiate based on something that is on the table. We have concluded a process that we believe is robust. It has arrived at an outcome. A preferred bidder has been appointed. We have a suite of protections in place that we believe will be effective.

I did not get a chance to say this when Deputy Stanley said there was no competition, but we have highlighted previously that the fact we only have a single better bidder in this competition is not unusual - it was the same in the United Kingdom. The critical thing is how to stitch in the protections for the State and the taxpayer and we believe we have done that. We have a preferred bidder appointed and we are in a process. My answer to the question is to ask why we would move from what we are doing to something that the company itself has said is not an offer. It is an assessment of giving us something under a different process and using certain hypothetical assumptions about how the company might do it. We could end up in a sort of death spiral, if I can call it that, if we halt or pause procurement and then go back out to the market. Who do we get to bid then? People have come forward in good faith in recent years and involved themselves in a process. I am uncertain that we would get a field of bidders. There will be a risk to the process. A decision has been made that someone in the process has been in some way given a status that would leave the outcome of that process open to challenge. We have no guarantee that if we went out to a process, having looked at the evidence of Eir, that the company would necessarily come back in. It may come back in on those terms but we are bound by state aid rules and normal contract law, both of which hold that we cannot offer the company something on those terms.