Ms Carolan Lennon:

The Deputy asked whether insourcing has been a failure. We certainly made some mistakes, there is no doubt about that, and it was certainly a bigger challenge than we anticipated. The Deputy is right about that. It took longer for us to set it up than we expected, particularly the greenfield operation in Sligo. We will put our hands up in that regard without a doubt. Do I still believe having customer care in-house and outside of Dublin is the right strategy? I absolutely do. We did not implement the decision as well as we should have, but I still believe it is the right decision. We now have to get it right and prove that it was the right decision. We certainly made some mistakes along the way. We underestimated the effort required to get it up and running. I agree with the Deputy's points in that regard. We have to fix it but insourcing customer care at a location outside of Dublin was the right decision.

I will look specifically at the case of Terryglass. I do not know that example but I will have a look at it. In terms of the other examples, this comes back to a point I made earlier. We identified 300,000 homes, farms and businesses and this was the greatest number of premises we could pass for the budget we have in the timeline we had. In the end, we added 40,000 more, often on the back of people, including members of the committee, identifying homes that were close and could be connected relatively easily. We have finished that programme and have moved on to our national build. Our teams are in the middle of that. This is NBI's programme now. This is the whole point of the intervention footprint. It is up to NBI to fill in those gaps. When people write to me, we still check whether we missed a property or whether it is within our 300,000 and is easy to connect but the reality is that most of these are clearly in the NBI intervention footprint.