Gilmore details €335k cost of EU presidency website

on 14/02/2013 00:00:00

The main cost of the website is connected to a €244,741 contract with Terminal 4 Solutions.

Mr Gilmore, in a written Dáil response to Sinn Féin's Pearse Doherty, said the contract includes website design and development, content management system licensing, annual support and infrastructure set-up, mobile strategy and execution of the mobile site, and training.

An additional €80,000 is being paid to the Local Government Management Agency for hosting, of which €40,000 was paid in 2012 and €40,000 will be paid in 2013.

An additional €10,794 is being paid to Terminal 4 Solutions for support outside standard working hours for the six months of Ireland's presidency of the EU.

Mr Gilmore said he understands that the comparable cost for the Danish presidency website was just over €1m. "Costs for the Cyprus Presidency website are currently not available," he added.

He said that negotiations with the selected supplier were centred on achieving the 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."

The tender attracted 11 bids. "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," said Mr Gilmore.

The website is capable of handling high volumes of traffic and has received more than 150,000 visits and more than 540,000 page views since its launch in mid-December.

It is equipped to deal with resource-intensive material such as live-streaming of events and similar media-rich content, and has hosted 54 videos and numerous images of events in the first weeks of the presidency.

Mr Gilmore said it also been integrated with presidency-specific social media accounts, with the presidency Twitter feed, which already has more than 5,700 followers, embedded across the website.