Cowen ‘wanted quick decision on licence’
Civil servant Maev Nic Lochlainn explained: "When Brian Cowen mentioned the idea of issuing a mobile phone licence, he was asking Martin Brennan to issue it within three months to have a winner and to have a licence which would suggest there was pressure to get the job done."
Mr Brennan chaired the project team of civil servants, drawn mostly from Mr Lowry's department, who selected Esat Digifone from five other consortia competing for the GSM2 licence in October 1995.
Danish-based Andersen Management International acted as independent consultants to the team.
"I have absolutely no recollection at all, at any time throughout the process, that there was pressure to influence the result in any way," Ms Nic Lochlainn, a member of the project team, told tribunal lawyer Jerry Healy SC.
"Since it is mentioned as a possibility, I want to put it on the record quite clearly that I was there at the time," she added.
"I have absolutely no recollection that there was some interference. I was at the meetings and I never heard anything in relation to it," she said.
Ms Nic Lochlainn agreed that a high degree of security and confidentiality attached to work on the GSM2 process might have hindered the work of the project team.
She agreed with Eoin McGonigal SC, for former Digifone chairman Denis O'Brien, that security and confidentiality not only applied to the report but also to all the documents which were secured in a locked room after and between team meetings.
The first opportunity department people who had not attended project team meetings would have of catching up was when they went to the next meeting in the same place, said Mr McGonigal.
Ms Nic Lochlainn replied: "There were three people who had copies (of documents) but they were told to lock them away," she said.
She agreed the protocol put in place didn't give the department people the opportunity of taking certain documents away and giving them the consideration that people liked to do.
Each time they came back to these meetings they were effectively having to regenerate a number of conversations without having had the advantage of considering the documentation fully in the meantime.
Ms Nic Lochlainn said Andersens were the experts and she relied and depended on them to do the work for which they had put themselves forward as the experts.
In that sense she was dependent on the documents produced and their veracity.
But there were errors in some of the documents and Andersens were clearly the best and only people to explain what happened, she said. The tribunal adjourned until next Tuesday.
