Mr. Denis O'Leary:

It was not that the Department was unable to agree or had concerns. Rather, we never received an answer or resolution to the issue we had. Eir could have stated yesterday that the national broadband plan company has decided to run its own infrastructure through the area, presumably because it was unable to come to an agreement. We assessed whether it would have been cheaper. While we knew that the decision to remove 300,000 homes from the intervention area would have a significant impact on our business plan, we nonetheless kept working on it and assessed where we could reduce costs. We believed that one way we could do so was to minimise the capital spend to get from the equipment in the towns to as far as where the customers were in the reduced intervention area. That is one of the ways we examined the matter.

Mr. Mahon might confirm that to have been the case.