Mr. Mark Griffin:

I would add a further point to that. As I mentioned in my opening statement, there were several critical junctures in the evolution of the project where the Department should have been more assertive. A view was taken at the time - I believe rightly so and this was confirmed by my counterpart in Northern Ireland at the Committee of Public Accounts hearings on 18 March - that he was the lead for the day-to-day management of the project, the management of payment claims and so on. Notwithstanding that, on looking at the papers there probably were three times where we could have been more involved. The first was in respect of the actual scoping of the original project. The Deputy will recall from reading the ASM and Prisa reports that one difficulty they had in determining exactly what was delivered and exactly what was eligible for payment was the inadequacy of the technical documentation provided regarding the definition of the project back in 2004. As a Department that had an overall responsibility for management rather than the day-to-day operational issues, we should have been more involved at that stage in scoping out or making sure that the project was adequately scoped out. This would have involved greater technical input from our Department at that point but this did not happen.

Second, when Aurora decided not to participate in the project, it changed things fundamentally in terms of the project structure. One had a project that was to involve the provision of dark fibre on the Aurora network between Dublin, Drogheda, Dundalk, Armagh and Belfast. The nature of the project then changed with the withdrawal of Aurora. Let me deal with the role of Aurora. It is clear from the documentation I have seen that there was a commitment at a relatively senior level within Aurora to be involved in the project. We have letters that are signed by a senior project manager in Aurora that set out clearly the company's intention to participate in the extreme broadband project. A review was conducted late in 2004 by the Aurora parent, that is, Bord Gáis, of the operations of the company in general. As I understand it, what arose from that review was a decision not to progress with the Aurora project. I suppose two issues then arise. The first is whether the Department should have been more involved in determining the exact nature of the partnership agreement between Aurora and Bytel and the second is whether, when Aurora decided to withdraw, the Department should have been involved in trying to convince it that this was a project with which it was worth continuing. In answering that question, I should note that Aurora was a subsidiary of a commercial semi-State company that operated under the aegis of the Department. As a Department, we do not involve ourselves in the day-to-day operations or the day-to-day projects of subsidiaries of our commercial semi-States. That is a practice and if one accepts that by and large, although we obviously have in place certain oversight arrangements, the commercial semi-States that operate under the Department have an independent mandate to discharge their commercial duties, at that relatively micro level pertaining to a single project under a subsidiary of one of the Department's commercial semi-States, I would have thought it unlikely and probably inappropriate for the Department to get involved in a direct way.

What this does not remove from the circumstances that pertained at the time is that by virtue of Aurora opting out of the Bytel project, the entire project changed. The letter of offer was predicated on certain things. It was predicated on a substantial contribution in kind from Aurora in the provision of its dark fibre in its network as a sort of underpinning of the Bytel project. This should have triggered alarms in both DETI and in the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources to the effect that the nature of the project had changed, that by definition this altered the letter of offer and, therefore, a new letter of offer was required. Had an intervention taken place at that stage, it is quite possible that a new letter of offer would have stated explicitly, for example, the involvement of Eircom in the project. This would have rendered that expenditure eligible for INTERREG funding and would have rendered eligible for INTERREG funding the additional work that formed the new Bytel-Eircom relationship, which was the extension of the line to Omagh, Derry, Bridgend and Letterkenny. This certainly was an oversight on the part of my Department and on the part of DETI at that time.