Mr. John Palmer:

Deputy Doherty may have noticed that if we were to do it, based on the legal advice we have had to date, we would not just be able to do it for domestic Irish cards, we would have to do it for all EU cards. To be fair, the independent operators – not the banks – do charge access fees for non-domestic cards. We would immediately be cutting off a revenue source if we were to do that now. Plus, we would end up with the rather strange situation that visitors from the EU to Ireland would not be charged something but when we go elsewhere in Europe in many places we are now charged access fees. There is a level-playing field issue there. Basically the status quo is what was considered to be fair.