Mr. Mark Griffin:

I will come in on that. To follow on from the conversation with Deputy Dillon, we have been tasked with overseeing the successful delivery of a once-in-a-lifetime project that is hugely complex and that will cost the State a maximum subsidy of €2.6 billion and then a bit for VAT. It would be utterly irresponsible of me if I did not ensure we had the expertise of the brilliant people I have working with us in the Department and external consultants.

Deputy Sherlock mentioned Analysys Mason. I will get Mr. Nearly and Mr. Mulligan to come in on this because they deal with the teams every day. Analysys Mason has been with us for a while. We went to tender and it came back to us. It provides services in development of the contract, technical solutions, evaluation, support in respect of the State aid, reference officer evaluation, project cost, model, compliance and robustness evaluation, mapping and monitoring of the intervention area, input to State aid issues and a whole range of work being done now, because we are in the active build and deployment phase, on supporting the overseeing of that.

I hope, with the passage of time, that more of that work will come back into the Department because Mr. Mulligan has lots of experience in the telecoms sector, as does Mr. Neary. Ms Leeson is our governance expert and Ms Carrigan is a chartered accountant. Mr. Ó hÓbáin is project sponsor. They have huge experience, but the reason Departments employ consultants is that, in the long run, there are occasions when they need to flex up and flex down in terms of the experience and capacity of a particular type needed in the organisation. I would hope, as this project enters a more mature phase and as we move beyond deployment, that the need for the extent of external expertise we have in place at the moment would diminish.

I go back to the point I made to Deputy Dillon. In the telecoms sector we do not have the core agency such as exists in the likes of Irish Water, housing agencies, the local government system or Transport Infrastructure Ireland. That simply was not there and available to us so we had to build that team. The risk for me, to be brutally honest with the Deputy, is that I would come before the Committee of Public Accounts and be accused of not having the right people in place to oversee a €2.6 billion contract.