State paid €42m to consultants for National Broadband Plan

National Broadband Ireland's Granahan McCourt said that the various management consultant contracts in place are due to expire next year.

The State has spent more than €42m to date on consultants for the controversial National Broadband Plan, according to new figures.

Some €24.4m was spent on “procurement advisory services” in the run-up to the awarding of the contract in late 2019.

The remaining €18m was incurred in terms of “contract management advisory” services, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications has said.

Chief beneficiary of the payments was accounting and consulting specialists KPMG, which was paid €14.8m between 2016 and November 2021 for services relating to “financial and procurement and specialist personnel”.

The second-largest payments were made to technology consultants Analsys Mason, with €11.5m paid out across the six years of the plan to date. Law firm Mason, Hayes and Curran was the highest-paid entity  in terms of legal services with €8.5m paid out to date.

Several firms in receipt of smaller payments were involved with the procurement phase of the contract but have not been retained for the management of the project itself.

Ernst and Young Business Advisory Services is the best-paid firm over the past two years, having received €6.2m for “commercial and financial” services despite not playing any part in the procurement process. The rollout of the National Broadband Plan has come in for much criticism since its inception due to the slow pace of delivery.

Last month it emerged just 27,000 homes are in a position to be connected to the NBP network — in sharp contrast to the initial plan to have 115,000 homes connected by the end of 2021.

That latter figure has since been revised down to 60,000, with the Department previously suggesting the slow pace of delivery is attributable to the pandemic, despite telecommunications work having been deemed essential work throughout various lockdowns.

Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee in October, secretary-general of the department Mark Griffin said one of National Broadband Ireland’s main contractors, the UK-based Kelly Group which had been expected to perform roughly one-third of planned works throughout 2021, had never come on stream.

National Broadband Ireland is the entity formed by Granahan McCourt, the US consortium and sole bidder which was awarded the €3bn contract in 2019, to carry out the plan which aims to have high-speed broadband delivered to 544,000 rural homes and businesses by the year 2027.

“Robust oversight and governance” will be “critical to ensuring that the project is delivered on time and within budget” Mr Griffin has told the PAC in a note seen by the Irish Examiner. He said that the various management consultant contracts in place are due to expire next year.

Mr Griffin further said that just 12% of the overall project will involve “new-build” broadband infrastructure when completed - a “sustainable approach which saves time and ensures value for money”.

Separately, the Department said that the National Cyber Security Centre, the State’s online security watchdog, has been notified of 9,229 cyber or ransomware attacks since 2018. Some 2,511 of those attacks occurred in 2021, it said.

The NCSC came to the fore in the wake of a ransomware attack which crippled the HSE’s systems in May of this year. It emerged in October that the centre, which has been without a director for more than 18 months, will not be in a position to fill that role until at least next year.