Mr. Ned O'Hara:

We have met both the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, since the Grant Thornton report was published to ascertain what their response would be. We had the initial meeting and we had some difficulty getting a subsequent meeting because it had not been considered. We met the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, at the end of February and we found out at that stage that the Grant Thornton report had been sent to NewERA for consideration. We were surprised that it had not been sent before that. We were also told there were plans for the cross-departmental working group to look at the post office network as the offline solution. That is going to report at the end of July. Our concern is that the end of July is too late. The other thing that surprised us is that it took until February to send the report to NewERA for independent evaluation, even though Grant Thornton is independent anyway.