What we know (so far)…

Is the NBP now dead?

Today we discuss a project which is shrouded in secrecy and now a political controversy about the suitability of a Minister having private chats with the remaining bidder for the NBP has erupted, the big imponderable question is “where next”?

Here’s a short recap on what we know so far, a more detailed document is available here and is available as a separate post on our website

Secrecy

The freedom of information process is fundamentally flawed, questions are often met with open hostility and sometimes even threats of litigation for allegedly making “vexatious and frivolous requests”. When requests are actually answered all we get blacked out pages in response, reminiscent of censorship during wartime, we seem to be at odds with our “decision makers”.

The Department seems to have forgotten that it’s our money they are flushing away with little or no regard for the people of Ireland or the amounts spent – currently estimated at 18 million euro (22 million).

ENET mans extension

Questions need to be raised in light of recent political revelations about ill-advised contacts with the owners of enet. These MANS contract extensions were awarded to enet with no outside scrutiny whatsoever, during this time.

The NBP project

The Eircom 300K process effectively rendered the whole NBP process ineffective and made the process unviable such that one major played walked away citing that the “process was not cost effective”.

Conclusion

In our minds the NBP project is mired in innuendo and red tape and is seemingly untenable in its current form the best, possibly, the only way forward at this point is to return to the drawing board for the contract and start over from the end of the mapping/scoping process, roughly where we were in Mid 2016. In reality the process shouldn’t take more than 6 – 12 months and we can learn from the mistakes made. Only openness and transparency can keep any process ontrack now after all it’s supposedly for our benefit.