Dr. Cecil Beamish:

The tenders that were received were deemed after assessment not to be value for money for the State and to involve potential cost exposures for the State to claims. The responsible decision, that everybody here would agree with, was not to expose the State by going with the available tender. Let me outline what is being done. Further sampling and analysis is being done and in greater detail on all the sediments; one of the issues is the level of contamination in some of the sediment areas. We are trying to see if we can more precisely define in the tender documentation the extent of the contamination and the appropriate treatments that would be requirements for different elements of the dredging. In that way, we hope to achieve more cost-efficient tender bids that can be advanced and proceeded with. The work is ongoing on the sampling exercise which will lead to the construction of a different tender specification, with the hope and expectation of getting a better value for money tender proposition.