Mr. Donal Moriarty:

On the location of the services in the UK, we locate our cloud data centres in accordance with best practice for the particular IT system in question so the particular IT system that supported. The recognised best practice across the industry, and it is Aer Lingus's strategy, is to migrate systems hosting to cloud data centres to improve performance, stability, security and sustainability. They are the four things that are generally improved by that.

The best practice location for the hosting of the Aer Lingus reservation system is in the UK. The expertise to cloud host this system is not currently available in Ireland so the UK is the best location. Having said that, we host many other applications and systems in cloud data centres in multiple locations, including in Ireland but just not this not this particular system. That is the rational from a best practice perspective as to why it is located in the UK. To give a greater context of industry best practice, management and protection of what are increasingly complex IT infrastructure systems and estates, they are increasingly being met by providers who have particular expertise in supporting and the maintenance of those systems. We have selected a top-tier provider to provide that service and that expertise happens to be currently located in the UK.

As the CEO mentioned, the outage was a truly exceptional set of circumstances. What happened, obviously in terms of the first line, was the fibre optic cable was broken due to construction work at a particular site in the UK and that took down the primary line. The secondary line, which is the fail-over or the backup line, also failed due to an entirely unrelated issue, which was a failure of a backup card. As the CEO mentioned, that was a truly extraordinary event for that coincidence to happen. In terms of addressing that issue, the backup card has been replaced. There is a new monitoring system in place to ensure that what happened on 10 September cannot happen again. It is extremely unlikely that an event or sequence of events as happened on 10 September can happen again. Further than that, we are now looking at introducing additional redundancy in order to protect our systems by having a tertiary system so a second fail-over or backup to provide additional security. We expect that that would never be required because we do not believe that a set of circumstances will arise again where both the primary and secondary lines would fail but we are looking to put that in place to provide that additional assurance to prevent an outage of this type every happening again.