The Moriarty tribunal has begun to play nine hours of tapes of meetings held in 1995 between bidders for the State's second mobile-phone licence and members of the committee which was charged with selecting the winner.
The playing of the tapes, which is to continue today and tomorrow, will involve "some level of tedium", the tribunal chairman, Mr Justice Moriarty, said before the start of the playing of the tapes. Five teams of lawyers are listening to the tapes.
Tapes of three three-hour meetings involving three of the six bidders for the licence, including representatives of Esat Digifone, are being played.
The meetings were held to allow presentations by the bidders and are followed by questions from members of the committee to the bidding teams.
Yesterday the first hour of the presentation of the Esat Digifone bid was played. The meeting began with the committee chairman, Mr Martin Brennan, introducing his team and pointing out that no further unsolicited submissions from bidders would be accepted by the committee. Mr Denis O'Brien, sounding nervous, could then be heard saying: "Good afternoon. First of all let me introduce the Esat Digifone team today."