Mr. Gary Delaney:

There is a great deal in what the Senator has said there, some of which I think I have answered already. I respect what the Senator is saying because we all want to believe the people who have been awarded the contract to deliver this on our behalf.

We all want to believe the people who have been awarded a contract will deliver this on our behalf. If it is the best, it would have been established. Everywhere else in the world where a postcode is being introduced, the idea is tested and piloted. This has not happened here. The fact that it is the first of its type in the world would suggest that we should test it before we go to the bother of rolling it out and wasting not only €27 million, but all the costs to all of the businesses, including An Post, and everyone else who wants to use it. Potentially, this could be €100 million out of the economy. It is quite substantial. I am in business and I am also in professional navigation. If somebody tells me something is the best, the first thing I will do is test it.

Emergency services were mentioned. In one of the annexes to the documentation I provided to the committee is a document from the director of the National Ambulance Service. When people were sitting here stating they were behind it and supporting it, he wrote a letter to a private citizen, not me but an individual, stating he had never said it would do all that is required for rapid access to patients. This is the direct opposite of what he was quoted as saying. He also went on to say that he does not know enough about it to be able to talk about it in depth. One would imagine if the director of a national agency supported something he would first investigate, test and analyse it and check its suitability for his or her purposes and for the public, because it is all about public safety. If the director of the National Ambulance Service is saying he cannot speak about it in depth, perhaps he never had the chance. I can tell the committee from other sources that neither the National Ambulance Service nor the fire service has ever tested or looked at Eircode in reality, as in a real-life scenario tested all the way through, which is what anybody would do if money was being spent on technology.

I accept if a business process outsourcing company such as Capita states it has the best in the world, we should believe it. One would suspect the people who say this would have some technical knowledge but this is not the case. There is no expertise on this in the organisation. One would also ask the company to show where it has been tested. An oversight contract was awarded to PA Consulting in April last year, and one of the requirements was that it would make a decision and assess whether Eircode was fit for purpose. We have not heard this. To do this, it would have to test and analyse it, but this never happened. What is of concern is that we might roll it out and find it is not useful. This should happen before we roll it out.