Mr. Ned O'Hara:

We indicated to An Post from earlier this year that it knew as well as we did that the transformation payments were going to cease. We expected that the Government would have reacted more quickly to the Grant Thornton report. There is no time for that to happen now. We said to An Post that the transformation payments must continue and we asked it to continue funding them. We have been told by An Post that it does not have the money to continue funding them. That is what causes the crunch. We are agnostic, as it were, as to where the money comes from, whether it is An Post or the Government. What happened is that two or perhaps three years ago, when Deputy Naughten was Minister with responsibility for communications, An Post got a loan of €30 million from the Government. That, in effect, was the start of the PSO. There is a PSO in effect for the last two or three years, only it is in the form of a loan as opposed to a formal arrangement.