Mr. Mark Griffin:

We have a team, headed by Mr. Mulligan as project director and Mr. Neary as the chief technology officer. We have technical advisers, policy advisers, governance experts and legal experts. We are building a team. Over time, I expect more of the effort to fall back into the Department, with less reliance on external consultants. It is important to say that the telecommunications sector is different from roads and water.

In the roads sector there is Transport Infrastructure Ireland, which has 293 staff. Several thousand extra staff are involved in build, operations and asset renewals. Transport Infrastructure Ireland has a local authority system beneath it so it has a huge infrastructure supporting something similar to what we run out of the Department with 30 fantastic people on our team and 20 to 25-plus consultants. We bring in the consultants to do particular things for us, so that is not necessarily a standing function within the Department. There are particular pieces of work we call for - for example, legal advice from William Fry, commercial advice from EY and technical advice from Analysys Mason - to supplement the work done by the team.