Noel Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)

To my knowledge, there are no legal contracts entered into in the case of terminal 2 but that is only because discussions have not terminated.

On Deputy O'Dowd's other point, this process was an unusually one, not one on which people have a firm grasp. We had independent advisers advising us on this. We set down a certain number of criteria which bidders had to meet in order to be able to submit a tender. It did not get to the tender stage. They had to satisfy what was like an expression of interest for the tender.

While some of the companies of which we speak were involved in running airports in other countries, in some cases the financial backup was not being provided by these international companies to the companies or sub-companies which were bidding, and financial criteria did play a large part in this in that we were not satisfied.

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