Mr. T.J. Malone:

I will take CIÉ first. There will be somewhere in the region of 664 or 665 crossings across the entire 227 deployment areas over the coming years. These crossings may be overhead or underground. It was important to get an agreement in place with CIÉ from a commercial point of view, a technical point of view and, above all, a safety point of view. We spent several months getting such an agreement in place and I am glad to say that we are now in a position to sign. We had a meeting last week at which all the final bits and pieces of the terms and conditions for the master agreement were agreed and the agreement will now be signed in the coming days. We will then apply for each individual licence we need as we go forward.

One of the issues we have had with TII and the national roads infrastructure is that, if you apply for a licence in respect of part of the national roads infrastructure and there is already a licence in place, you cannot get a licence until the previous licence has been closed off.

That other licence might have nothing to do with our project. It could be for something else that is happening, whether it is a local authority, Irish Water or somebody else bringing something down a national road. In fairness, TII has come to the party with us. We have had a trial taking place in Blessington for the past couple of weeks whereby we have concurrent licences open. We are doing that a view to extending the practice across the rest of the country.