Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to make the point rather than ask a question. Since Eir started rolling out broadband - and there are many people 100 yards beyond the point to which the service is provided - what we are finding is that there is a quiet revolution taking place and people are only working odd days in cities. More and more of them are working more days at home. They commute into cities now and again to conduct whatever business they want, to attend meetings and whatever. The rest of the time they are operating from home. Even the big multinational technology companies are doing this.

I am very worried that the witness is driving a plan that is going to cost this country a fortune, that is not dealing with what is really happening on the ground, that is driven by a crazy ideology which is out of date and that does not deal with social deprivation in the cities, which is pervasive in large areas of the latter in which the most deprived and least educated communities in Ireland are to be found. In fact, the witness is basing the principle of driving things into the cities on some university thesis which states that the only creative thought happens in cities. I do not buy into that. I find I can think as creatively as anybody around here. When I go up the mountain on a Sunday, I think even more creatively in the clear air and away from the background noise. I do not think I am unique in that. Artists and all sorts of people would ask for a quiet atmosphere in which to work. That is just putting myself into isolation. We have got every kind of high-tech way of talking to people. I am of the view that we need to hasten slowly on this and have a much more detailed debate about where we are going.

Galway city is chock-a-block. Dublin city is chock-a-block with traffic jams and there no houses available. The plan is that we are going drive more growth into those cities before we catch up with the absolutely astronomical problems already there. Galway has the worst traffic in the entire country. It seems to me to be a madness of massive cost to the economy, with billions and billions of wasted money and people sitting in cars-----