Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for intervening and I do so in case I have to leave and I do not want to come back to discover that the meeting has ended. It was useful for us to get the correspondence today on the communications between Eir and the Department. Regarding the 300,000 additional rural homes to which Eir is delivering broadband directly, I understand Eir had originally approached the Department in 2014 or 2015 - Mr. Neary might be able to confirm the year - for those to be excluded from any national broadband plan and that the then Minister, Alex White, ruled that out. I was interested in the correspondence between Eir and the current Minister, Deputy Naughten, to find out when that changed. It is not clear from the correspondence. The only meeting it seems where it could have been discussed was in the summer of 2016. What is difficult to understand, in the context of Eir's presentation at a later meeting, is that it started that programme in the first quarter of 2017 - in other words, it already had 10,000 houses done in the first quarter. Therefore, it must have started in January or February 2017. In the context of the commitment assigned in 2017, that must have been agreed with the Minister the previous summer. When was it decided to change the approach whereby the Department and the previous Minister said that we would not do that, when was it changed? When was it signalled to Eir that the Department would allow this different approach? That is not insignificant. It only became apparent obviously in April 2017 but the bidding process must have been proceeding for at least six, eight, nine or ten months during which time the other parties would not have known that the whole terms of the process were changing. When was it decided to switch tack in that regard?