How interesting it was last week to see the Applegreen consortium launched legal action against Transport Infrastructure Ireland in an attempt to overturn the awarding of a contract for new motorway service stations to Topaz, which is owned by Denis O'Brien and his nephew, Emmet O'Neill.

Applegreen, which raised €70 million in a stock market listing in June, believes its consortium should be awarded the tender, which it lost in a tie-breaker on the thickness of footpaths.

It has lobbed in a High Court suit together with an affidavit from Eugene Moore, Applegreen's developments director, who is in charge of building out its network of service stations.

Moore is, of course, a former director of the National Roads Authority, the forerunner of Transport Infrastructure Ireland. He was a ministerial appointment to the NRA under the last Fianna Fáil-led government. I wonder how his old colleagues feel about Moore taking them to court?