Mr. Steve Fitzpatrick:

It is useful that the regulator is coming in because he said that through their work they reduced the losses in the USO from €57 million to €19 million over a period of years.

I think it could be argued that their inactivity in the pricing arena led to the losses in the first place. If one calculates the losses on the USO over that period, it runs in hundreds of millions. That was the money the company could have used to invest in new products and new services and could have used it to invest to make the transition from letters to parcels and packages and could have used the money to try to encourage people to leave as the business collapsed. All that money has been wasted in plugging the gap for many years. The USO is the cost of delivering to every household in the country five days a week. When one loses 1,000 letters on a delivery, the postman is probably going into a house with two letters instead of three. It is very difficult to make those savings. The way to deal with it was to reflect the movement in price across the EU, not to have Ireland with the cheapest postage stamp rates in Europe. The demographic spread on our small island means that Ireland should have the dearest postage rates in Europe. The regulatory body that deals with these crises, looking after itself and paying bonuses, has questions to answer on how its pricing strategy led to the company losing hundreds of millions of euro. Much of that money went across the Border, as Mr. Pigot has pointed out. I think the committee might consider asking those people questions, although I recognise the difficulty the committee had in doing that previously.