Patrick Nulty (Dublin West, Labour)
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To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the amount it costs to produce the EU Presidency ties which were distributed to Members of the Oireachtas on 28 January 2013. [6844/13]

Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)
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In view of their role as public representatives, a Presidency tie or scarf was presented to each Oireachtas member in January. A total of 187 items were distributed. The total production cost amounted to €1,153.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)
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To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade if he will confirm the estimate of the overall cost of the EU Presidency website, EU2013.ie; if he will provide a breakdown of costs showing the purpose of the cost, the supplier when available and the date on which it is expected the cost will be incurred; if he will outline the steps that he undertook to ensure that the cost of the EU Presidency website was reasonable and represented value for money; if he will further provide the cost of the two previous EU Presidency websites, CY2012.eu and EU2012.dk; and the steps he took to ensure that costs to the State in developing EU2013.ie were minimised. [6617/13]

Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)
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The overall cost of the EU Presidency website is estimated to be:

- €244,741.71 inclusive of VAT for the principal contract with Terminal 4 Solutions, covering a range of services including website design and development, Content Management System licensing, annual support and infrastructure set-up, mobile strategy and execution of the mobile site, and training.

- €10,794 inclusive of VAT paid to Terminal 4 Solutions for 24/7 support outside standard working hours for the six months of the Presidency.

- €80,000 paid to the Local Government Management Agency (LGMA) for hosting, of which €40,000 were paid in 2012 and €40,000 will be paid in 2013.

I understand that the comparable cost for the Danish Presidency website was just over €1 million. Costs for the Cyprus Presidency website are currently not available.

The contract to develop the EU Presidency website was part of a wider Department of Foreign Affairs tender for the redevelopment of its websites to include the Department’s own website and the website for Irish Aid. It was awarded following an EU-wide open competitive tender.

This approach gives the greatest opportunity to qualified companies from across the EU and more widely to bid for the contract. The tender attracted 11 bids.

The winning company, Terminal 4 Solutions, which is an Irish company, was selected because it offered the best value for money when the quality of their proposed solution, its comprehensiveness, its technical merit as well as the quality of technical support, training and knowledge-transfer being offered were assessed against the proposed costs.

In defining the scope of the project during 2011, consultations were held with then-recent Presidencies, Belgium and Hungary, to ascertain the nature and scale of Presidency websites, and the standard expected by users.

From these and other discussions, it was agreed that the Irish Presidency website must be a high-performing site, able to meet clearly-defined specifications:

- secure, accessible and available at all times (eu2013.ie includes a full disaster recovery site to ensure business continuity)

- capable of handling high volumes of users (eu2013.ie has received over 150,000 visits and more than 540,000 page views since its launch in mid-December)

- equipped to deal with resource-intensive material such as live-streaming of events and similar media-rich content (eu2013.ie live-streams coverage of high-level meetings in Dublin and in Brussels, as well as cultural and other events, and has hosted 54 videos and numerous images of events in the first weeks of the Presidency)

- constructed to achieve a high ranking with internet search engines

- available in multiple language versions (eu2013.ie exists in English, Irish, French and German versions).

It was also determined that the site needed to be made available across a number of mobile platforms, with the capacity to track and monitor use. It has also been integrated with Presidency-specific social media accounts (the Presidency twitter feed is embedded across the website and already has over 5700 followers).

Negotiations with the selected supplier were centred on achieving this desired level of outcome at the lowest cost. The contract was agreed on a fixed-price basis and any extra resources required have been the responsibility of the developer.

The time taken to research the requirements, the definition of the project scope, the open procurement and the fixed-price nature of the contract demonstrate that adequate steps have been taken to ensure that the website costs are reasonable and represent good value for money.