Mr. T.J. Malone:

I will take the first part of that. One of the mandates that we had when we sat down to look at the deployment plan at the very start was to ensure that no county was left behind and to bring all 26 counties at the one time. If I was to look at this from a logistical and selfish and from a normal roll-out point of view, you would tend to go into one county, finish that county and move to the next county. From a contractor's and from a sensible point of view, to try to finish, you would do one county and move on. However, because of the nature of this, and we are very conscious not to disadvantage any particular county, we have set out to bring all 26 counties together at the one time. Obviously, different counties have different numbers of houses and premises. If you take Cork, it would be by far the biggest county in terms of premises that fall into the intervention area. Meath would have somewhere in the region of 18,500 or 19,000 homes.

In terms of the initial areas in Meath that we are looking to take on board, we split the country into 227 different deployment areas. Deployment areas are basically what most people would know as an exchange area. Those particular areas could be based in one county. Skerries would be one, for instance, and that could bleed into other surrounding counties. Dunboyne and Clonee would be in the Deputy's area. That would cover premises in Dublin, Meath, and it would bleed into Kildare and surrounding counties. It would cover all of those areas.

On the first ones coming up in the Deputy's area, houses would be served from the Drogheda area and the Skerries area. Dunboyne and Clonee would also be done. All of those are surveyed and designed.

Delvin is another location in the Deputy's area that is being surveyed and designed.

The key for us, particularly in the Meath area, is getting that through the local authorities. In general, local authorities have been fantastic to work with. We have found the engagement with Meath County Council a bit tougher. We have had conversations and recent engagement with the CEO of the council and others. We are moving forward in Meath but we have been slow getting engagement in the county to get the roll-out through. In general, the local authorities are key, as I said. If I were to fast forward to the next two years, 2022 and 2023, we would be looking at approximately 5,700 premises going live in Meath in that period.