Alex White (Dublin South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Moynihan for his insights and his questions. To reference the Estimates I remind colleagues that the 2014 allocation had allowed for an end of contract provision of €9.058 million for the NBS service-provider and an allocation of €6.2 million for schools broadband, as well as additional moneys for the separate issue of postcodes.

To deal with the national broadband plan provisions for 2015, the provision has increased from €1.3 million in 2014 to €4.1 million for 2015. To address Deputy Moynihan's question, the main reason for this increase of €2.8 million is to meet the payments required under the four new consultancies entered into in late 2014 and early 2015.

They were to cover the legal questions in respect of the national broadband plan, which is a very big project, the economic and financial questions that arose, on which the Deputy touched, and procurement and technical questions, as well as the engagement of additional external expertise. We are proceeding with that work.

Colleagues will be aware that last November I published the outcome of a mapping exercise in order that citizens, businesses and colleagues would be able to see the position on what the private sector had undertaken to deliver by the end of 2016 and, by extension, what State intervention would be required in circumstances where the private sector was not willing or in a position to provide services. The mapping exercise was critical; in fact, it was required in the context of the state aid application, to which the Deputy referred. We will have to make a state aid application under the general principle, of which colleagues will be aware. State aid rules – EU-wide rules – prohibit the State from intervening in the provision of services where the private or commercial sector is delivering or intends to deliver a service. We have not yet made our state aid application, but I expect it to be made sometime mid-year. We are not yet ready to make the application. We are doing an enormous amount of work on a daily basis in the Department and with our external advisers in looking at financial, governance, legal and contract issues. Will there be one or several contracts in terms of the State's intervention? Who will own the network, which will be the equivalent of 100,000 km of road, if one were to think of it as a roads system? An enormous amount of work needs to be done this year on the state aid application to take us to the stage to which we need to get by the end of the year to go to tender to find a contractor or contractors to build the network. That is the way we need to do it to do it properly.