Mr. Paul Quinn:

As the Deputy is probably aware, we had different rulings from the High Court through to the Court of Appeal and then the Supreme Court where we got a final ruling in relation to matters. Therefore, the costs did not fall solely to the State but we did pick up a higher proportion than the other party. Those costs were finally settled in December 2020. The final cost was just a shade, that is, a few euro under €360,000.

As to the Deputy's question on learning from it, there has been an amount of learning from it. In particular, as Mr. McCarthy said in his opening statement, public procurement is an extraordinarily complex area and is extremely legalistic. That makes it very difficult for practitioners, particularly when one sees that the courts at various levels can sometimes have different rulings themselves. It shows some of the complexity of interpreting the rules but we always learn from what we do, what goes well and what does not. Undoubtedly, there are some learnings from that particular case that we have codified and shared because there were some learnings from it, as there always are in relation to these things.