Bobby Aylward (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Mr. Griffin is giving the committee a lot of information and it is hard to keep up with it all. I just want to come to the brass tacks of the situation. We are aware that the dark blue areas on the plan are economically sorted, the light blue areas is where there are 300,000 extra homes with 2,000 being done, but then we have the amber areas that are marked for State intervention and are not commercially viable. I would like to know more about that area. We have had all the reports, the Switcher.iereport and the Vodafone Ireland report; I have them all here with me and I could keep on reading them for another ten minutes but they basically say that 37% of rural businesses are being forced out of their localities because they cannot rely on the current broadband service and that jobs and SMEs are basically walking away. Businesses in the survey have said they will leave the rural areas where they are currently situated in order to get high-speed broadband because they want to be economically viable and be able to take on their rivals. These are the questions I want the Secretary General to answer. I have all the reports. I want to know whether 180,000 people still will not have access to high-speed broadband in 2020 or what does Mr. Griffin envisage the situation will be in 2020, that is, in three years' time?