Ms Carolan Lennon:

It was not about retail. I was the managing director of wholesale when this project kicked off and so I led it at the start, with the ambition, as I said, to win it all. The team had engaged with the Department for 18 months as the gap funding model evolved and developed and we understood what it meant. It was not a retail issue for us: it was a wholesale issue. The Department, as part of that level playing field, did not want our established wholesale business to sell in the intervention footprint. It wanted Eir to set up a new wholesale business to sell in the intervention footprint, which would have involved new staff, new systems, etc. That was one issue. The Department also wanted us to offer better SLAs in the intervention footprint. In terms of cost and complexity, recommending that to the board was difficult. It did not make a lot of sense commercially.