Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 15 September 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

Business of Joint Committee
Update on National Broadband Plan: National Broadband Ireland

Mr. Peter Hendrick:

I will break it down into sections and allow my colleague, Mr. T. J. Malone, to give you some more detail in terms of the recovery plan, the numbers for 2022 and a sense of the momentum of the build programme. In terms of the impact, and I accept it is not one thing that has delayed the programme for this year, Covid-19 has impacted on all of the supply chain and all of our partners feeding into that supply chain. The UK contractor, Kelly Communications, is just one element of it. Obviously, there is a reprocurement activity that we have to do. We do not just immediately award to another contractor. There is a delay in terms of looking at what the mitigations are and whether a contractor can mobilise and meet the demand of the additional workload. There are many moving parts in terms of all the impacts we have experienced. In March 2021 we sat down with the Department and looked at all of these, and we looked at a rebaseline, and under the contract we considered what reliefs we could get. We had to spend a good deal of time showing the Department all of the things that feed into the delay and ultimately the relief and the changed milestone deliverables for 2021. There is a huge amount of detail in this that-----