Ms Carolan Lennon:

We said we would get out of Dublin. We had venues in Cork and Limerick already so we said we would expand them and put more resources in there, but we also wanted to go somewhere else. We picked Sligo because we thought it would give us access to a whole new set of resources from Sligo and neighbouring counties, where people might come in and travel. We got great support from the local council and from IDA Ireland and we picked Sligo. We also have an Eir exchange building there and some of our field guys work there. We built a contact centre from scratch in Sligo. We put all the infrastructure in place, we hired the head of the contact centre and hired all the staff. We in Eir - me and the team - underestimated the challenge and we also underestimated the impact of our Dublin centre, which was outsourced, getting smaller as people in Dublin went off to get new jobs, and the speed at which we could ramp up in Sligo, so at one stage they were out of sync. We were losing people in Dublin and we were not hiring them quickly enough in Sligo.