Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am not going to comment on that. He made a mistake of meeting someone who was tendering in a process. People have acknowledged that was a mistake. In the event, when the matter was evaluated, it was found that while the Minister made a mistake, he had, by removing himself from his position, removed the potential for the allegation that the process might have been tainted. The verdict of the evaluator was that he did the right thing.

With regard to Fianna Fáil and others preferring the ESB, it is important to recognise that one cannot give state aid to an economic entity unless there is a procurement process. Senator Rose Conway-Walsh is correct that if the private sector cannot deliver, one is entitled to provide state aid. That does not mean, however, that it can be given to anyone. It has to be given in a fair and objective way based on the circumstances and based on a procurement process that is fair to others who might also want to avail of it. That is very clear in the state aid code. This was confirmed by the European Commission on numerous occasions. One could set up a body from scratch, as was the case with Irish Water. There are those who are advocating this. One could set up a State company that would set about procuring for the rolling out of the fibre. We saw all the trauma involved in starting up Irish Water and getting it to the current point. Having set up a company, one would have to start a procurement process associated with identifying how to roll out the 146,000 km of fibre. This would cause a delay. At the very start of the process, this option was considered. It was considered again in respect of the costs. On every occasion, the option was ruled as being less reliable and more costly, and it was said it would not deliver for us. It is not that those options were not considered. We gave them very careful consideration.

The Senator asked whether we costed the alternatives. I have heard people ask why a cost-benefit analysis was not done of every one of the alternatives. When we examined the alternatives, we examined the essential ways in which they would be different from the existing project. Consider the option of going wireless, for example. We considered what a wireless-based service would do in terms of cost and performance. We did not go back and re-examine the benefits of the regime. We simply considered all the elements that would be changed if we opted for the alternative. With that, we found it would be more costly to reach 100%, and that the network would be shared. In other words, if someone else is using it, I am losing my capacity. There is a fixed amount and the greater the number of users, the more the capacity reduces. It is not like fibre where everyone has full capacity.