Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has been captured by the big telcos and he is suffering from Stockholm syndrome. He is looking at the shiny technology they are waving at him and using their verbiage. In particular, he has been captured by Eir. It has led to a really difficult situation for the State notwithstanding the Minister's best efforts to get SIRO to remain part of the bidding process. If the chat around these Houses is to be believed, he has been on bended knee, a bit like the football players in the United States, arms linked with his officials, begging and pleading with SIRO to remain in the race to give credibility to a bidding process that now has no credibility.

We have heard the Minister's protestations since he came into office that he needed to be careful and do this right. He had the big baddies in Europe looking over his shoulder and he was there for the people. He has lost contact with the people we are seeking to serve, for whom we are to roll out a broadband service. We are no further on today than we were in 2012. We are no further on in understanding when that intervention area is going to have a broadband service. I could go back through the Official Report to when the former Minister, Pat Rabbitte introduced the project and when the former Minister, Alex White and others sought to move it on. There was talk of a delay of a month, two months, then it became six months. The Minister has still failed to give this House and those outside these Houses a date for the start of this contract.

The Minister used the term "we", and that is why I say he has been captured by Eir and others. He now sees himself as part of a conglomerate: "We are delivering to 60 towns." I remind the Minister that these are commercial decisions by large multinationals that see a return on their investment for their shareholders and because they give him the benefit of cutting a tape, the Minister thinks he is part of it. When is he going to get real and start spending the taxpayers' money for the benefit of those 542,000 premises he talks about?

We need action from the Minister. We need to get this tender through and we need a start date. The Minister knows from project management experience that unless he sets a timetable projects never happen. They keep getting pushed out. If he has a timetable he will have to answer to this House, and I and others will criticise him if he misses a deadline, but it is better to have a deadline and have some milestones as it is good project management to set dates. The Minister should be prepared to suffer the political consequence of someone kicking him around a bit because he fails to meet the deadlines but that is better than running around hand in glove with big corporations that are just pushing him around. At this stage they know he will issue a statement, cut the tape and the roll-out to the 542,000 homes is no closer. The Minister is being tied up in knots. He should put pressure on the Department and those who are naysayers and set the deadlines. A total of €7 million of the €15 million is spent and perhaps he will get the other €7 million by the end of the year. That is not what it is about. Multiples of that amount need to be spent. People need to see broadband rolled out to areas that do not have it.

What is happening at the moment is good. I am pleased that at last Eir has taken a decision to invest in its network. It is replacing poles that fell over years ago. It is stringing fibre along them principally into places that already had a reasonable level of broadband. It is doing it on the edges of villages that were already reasonably close to the exchange and had some element of a broadband service but now they will have fibre. That is fantastic. It is a commercial decision so let us not clap ourselves on the back for that. The question is when will the people who live beyond the edge of the village get a service. The Minister should move away from taking credit for what others are doing. He should concentrate on defining the national broadband plan as that which requires State intervention, which falls on his shoulders. Whatever way the Minister will kick the sand in people's eyes and hope they will somehow get confused, and that he will get to cover himself in some level of glory by taking credit for what others are doing, will not happen because people in rural areas who do not have a broadband service are mightily unimpressed. They are particularly concerned now that the Minister's courtship of Eir has led to SIRO pulling out, notwithstanding his best efforts, which has led to a situation where the taxpayer will likely have to pay a lot more now because there is not really a competition anymore. Let us be honest. There is no competitive environment now for this tender. As the Minister well knows, prices will be jacked up and the taxpayer will have to pay more money. That is all because the Minister has failed to get a tendering process in place that is effective and seeks to have a start date and a finish date so that the work can be done on a project basis.