Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I may be less brief. I am sure the Minister is aware that the Irish people pay the third highest prices for broadband in the European Union. Only Luxembourg and Malta pay more than we do.

We rank 22nd in terms of the quality of connection so we have one of the highest costs to the public and a really poor service. I believe this is largely due to the monopoly activity of private sector operators in the market coupled with a history of weak regulation by the Irish State. The national broadband plan was an admirable and visionary plan but the State has been led a merry dance by private sector operators. I hope I am wrong but my prediction is that based on what has happened, what is happening and the direction the Minister seems intent on taking this, for the next 25 years the Irish people will continue to be fleeced on broadband prices.

With regard to the process, originally, there was a map of the country with blue and orange areas. We were told that the blue areas, which were generally the urban areas, were already covered by private operators and would be completely filled in by private operators by the end of 2016. That is what it said on the Department's web page. That then changed. I looked it up the other day when I heard that Eir had pulled out. It no longer says that urban areas will be covered by commercial operators by 2016. It talks about where commercial operators are delivering or have indicated plans to deliver high-speed broadband services so there are no dates anymore. So now the test for urban areas is that some private operator must have stated that it has a plan to deliver to that area. I will read out a response from Eir to a Fianna Fáil councillor in Greystones about an estate in Greystones in a blue area. Eir stated there were no plans at that stage of which it was aware to deliver enhanced broadband to this area. We have gone from the private operators getting this finished by 2016 to the private operators at least being obliged to have a plan to do this at some point in the future to the private operators, or at least Eir in this case, writing to a public representative saying it has no plans to do this. That is what is happening on the ground today.

We then got the news last year that what Eir had actually done was go through the country on a house-by-house level so anyone who pulls up the national broadband plan will see all of these light blue areas, the 300,000 premises that Eir will do. They are not big geographic chunks. Eir has gone up roads. It has gone up this road and that road. Interestingly, we will have to connect a lot of the bit that is left through Eir. My understanding is there is now a big fight happening because Eir wants to charge a heap of money for the bit that is left, that is, for those data to go over the bit Eir said it is going to do. My understanding of reports at the time was that Eir running away with these profitable bits increases by several hundred million euro the cost to the State because we are left with the least profitable and most expensive pieces. I do not know whether Eir will do it but it appears it can now sit like a troll on a bridge and demand rent from every consumer who must pass over its network and indeed demand rent for the poles, which it has been doing for many years.

The result of all of this is that, obviously, we have one bidder left so by definition, this is no longer a competitive tender process. There is no competitive tension left in this at all. Eir has taken a big chunk of it - the profitable piece - and it appears enet will do the other piece so what is essentially happening is that we are moving from a monopoly network, which means the Irish people have been screwed for years on price and we all know this, to several localised monopolies, one of which is owned by Eir. I will read from an article in the Irish Examineron this matter. I would be interested in getting the Minister's thoughts. The article stated that Eircom had racked up €4.1 billion of gross debt through five ownership changes in 13 years - and, of course, we have just had another ownership change - before it was forced into the State's largest ever examinership filing in 2012 resulting in €1.8 billion of its borrowings being written off and a band of its most senior lenders led by US investment giant Blackstone seizing control of the business. The article states:

In the interim, the company, or what was left of it, has had many owners who, as short-term investors do, asset stripped with abandon. The company was entangled in almost insurmountable debt. Its broadband service, especially in rural areas but in many suburban areas too, was - and often still is - hopelessly inadequate despite being among the most expensive in Europe.

In an article in Silicon Republic, John Kennedy states that "needless to say, it came to naught, and what followed was a decade of asset-stripping by various owners of post-IPO Eircom; failed and dashed investments in a promised brave new age of deregulation." So that company has just taken ownership of these 300,000, and in my opinion, has been allowed to do so by the Government. That is very worrying. The Minister's response has been that this is great news because it is accelerating the connection to houses but he never talks about price. That is Eir.

The second monopoly provider is enet. I am not alleging that enet has done anything wrong but I am alleging that the Government is doing something wrong because in the past hour, I received a response from the Department to a parliamentary question I tabled. It specifically concerned the FOI request that Gavin Sheridan submitted. What Gavin Sheridan sought was the concession agreement between enet and the Government. In other words, the Irish people already pay enet to operate a fibre network that was put in the ground with European money many years ago specifically to deal with rural areas that the market would not get to - in other words, a small version of what the Minister is about give enet now. I submitted a parliamentary question to say I was very perplexed by this because Gavin Sheridan put in his FOI request asking to see the concession agreement and the Department refused. Mr. Sheridan then appealed the decision to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner and the commissioner told the Department it needed to release the information because it is public interest and does not violate commercial sensitivity. The Department, or the Government, took the extraordinary step of appealing that to the High Court, which ruled in Gavin Sheridan's favour and said there is public interest to be served and commercial sensitivity does not cover this. The High Court ordered the Department to release the concession agreement - enet's agreement with the State - to Gavin Sheridan. The Department then took the extraordinary step of appealing the High Court's decision to the Court of Appeal, which, coincidentally, is not scheduled until February next year - long after enet will have signed up to its new contract.

I submitted a parliamentary question to the Department a few days ago in which I asked how many FOI requests had been received by the Department since 2010 and of those, how many it had brought to the High Court or Court of Appeal. How often in the past eight years has the Department gone to court to stop anyone finding anything out? The Minister probably will not be surprised to find out that the answer is that of the 799 FOI requests submitted to his Department over the past eight years, the Department has gone to court once and that was to protect the enet concession agreement. Does the Minister think there is a case to answer here where he and this Government have gone to court once after receiving over nearly 800 FOI requests over eight years to protect an existing agreement between the State and enet, which the court has ruled the Department needs to release? Yet the Minister is asking Parliament and the Irish people to trust him in signing up to an even bigger version of the same contract with enet. Does the Minister think that is reasonable? In the context of asking Parliament and the Irish people to trust that the Minister will do a great deal with enet, will he now obey the order of the High Court and release that information to Gavin Sheridan so that we can see what is happening? Does he accept that creating these monopolies constitutes a serious risk to the future pricing for Irish business and domestic consumers over the coming years?