Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The pilot was done in Dublin with the Dublin City Enterprise Board before Christmas. The programme has been tweaked as a result of what we learned from that experience. The programme will be mainlined throughout the country from June of this year. We expect to get 1,000 small companies involved. Approximately 23% of small companies do business online. Our survey work tends to show that after the crash small companies felt besieged by other problems and that those difficulties continued during the recession. At that stage, they were not as amenable as they might have been to exhortations to do business online. We are trying to step up that level of engagement. This country's e-commerce sector was worth €3.7 billion in 2012, with 70% of the products or services in question being imported into this country from outside the jurisdiction. The only way we can deal with such a big spend is to compete. We are trying to persuade small and medium-sized companies that their capacity to grow employment and output would be significantly enhanced - there is literature to demonstrate this - if they were to transact business online. There are a number of initiatives in this area. The point the Deputy made about the interaction with the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation is not unrelated. Obviously, we are addressing the related issue of the quality of broadband in rural Ireland. Later this week, I will bring to the House a Bill that will allow the ESB to use its supply system if it engages with a partner on a joint venture to roll out fibre to parts of rural Ireland. We are clearing the legislative way for it to become a reality. If that happens, when taken with the very extensive programme of investment that has been laid out by Eircom, for example, it will certainly continue to improve the quality of broadband that is available to people outside the large population centres.