Mr. Peter Hendrick:

We signed that agreement in June. It is a phased ramp-up because one has to buy machinery to put poles in and hire contractors. There is mobilisation and the phasing of that started in October 2021. There will be another step in April and another in June to increase the capacity. A year on, we now have 154,000 premises under construction, almost ten deployment areas complete and we are active in all 26 counties. We have much better visibility in terms of what the risks are and what the volume needs to be. That is why Mr. Malone said we are now engaged with Eir again to say that we are clear on the programme and we know what the risks are. We now want to know how to build the same contingency into our build programme that we have in our survey and design. We are ahead percentage-wise so we want to do the same on the build programme and we are working on that.

With regard to areas of concern or areas where we need support, we can share the list of issues we had a year ago, which ones we have mitigated against and where we are today. We are always going to have challenges on the ground. We spent a number of millions of euro redesigning some of the deployment areas that we had already designed because of learnings we took from the first ten deployment areas. Those efficiencies will start to come through the programme but we will start providing more predictability around when homes are going to get passed.

On communications, in August we released a map on our website which gave people visibility, typically within a 12-month or 24-month period depending on where they are in the programme. The challenge with the predictability of that and giving them a shorter window was that we could not really do that until the designs were completed. As Mr. Malone said, we will have done 70% of the designs at the end of the year and will have much more certainty about the timing and activity that is required in order to pass those homes.

Today, 195,000 premises are awarded to our contractors. The contractors have start dates and finish dates and we know what we need to do to clear any blockages out of their programme, such as getting the S254 licences for the poles, using the Eir "make ready" programme or getting the rapid response teams to fix problems at the back end of that programme. We are putting all those things in place to mitigate the challenges and put predictability into the programme. Within Ms Collins's team we will update the website with more certainty around times. There are always areas or homes that might fall out of a deployment area. Deployment areas might fall behind because a national motorway is being put through an area and that means we have to delay a deployment area or a ribbon to a later date. There will always be that challenge in terms of communication but we are trying to bring predictability to the programme.

In terms of shareholder funding, we originally required €175 million of shareholder funding but we signed our shareholders up to €223 million of committed funding. Our shareholders are contractually committed and bound to provide that funding as and when we call it. Two years ago, getting operators or investors to look at investing in full fibre networks was very difficult but things have changed. We have always believed that wholesale fibre networks would be the future. Going forward, the European Commission has said that every single premises will have access to gigabit connectivity by 2030. That has driven a huge demand to roll out fibre networks, both under commercial funding and state aid funding. What we have developed and the lessons we have learned about construction and wholesale operations here in Ireland under NBI can add a lot of value in what is happening across Europe and we believe we have a part to play in that. We could bring an ESBI-type approach to what is happening in Europe and we have led the way to date on this.