Noel Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)

It is no good that they are the biggest companies in the world if one has no recourse to their finances. If one of the big international operators submitted an expression of interest in this, and it was the international branch of the firm that did so, I am sure it would have met the financial criteria, but that is not the way they did it. They had subsidiary companies bidding and some of them did not meet the financial criteria. The criteria they had to meet were clearly laid out and none of them met the criteria. There was no choice in this. Deputy O'Dowd is not privy to the detail of it, but they did not meet the criteria. Particularly with the strong advice that I got, there was no way that I could ignore criteria set down that were independently adjudicated on. Once the criteria were not met, one could not go ahead with the tender.

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