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

I will discuss the dormant accounts issue later. The Minister has €1 million for broadband. While broadband is not within his Department's remit, it and roads are the greatest issues in rural Ireland. Some people are getting broadband while others are not. What has been done by Eir is fantastic. For those who have it, 1 Gbps makes them internationally competitive. I met a manufacturer after he had acquired 1 Gbps broadband. When he told me that there was only one snag, I threw my eyes to heaven and wondered what it was now, but his only problem was that his customers on the much more populated island across the water could not match what he had. I asked him was it not a great thing to be able to say that, at the back of the mountain, he had 1 Gbps and they were relying on a lot less.

Where this broadband is provided, it is fantastic, but it is driving the 30% of people who are half a mile, 1 mile, 3 miles, 5 miles or 8 miles away mad. Will the Minister give me a small guarantee today, namely, that we will adopt without messing the same policy to broadband that we adopted to electricity and telephones when they were introduced and that, unlike what happened with water, it will be provided to every house and business in the country? Fibre is cheaper to roll out than copper. Let us go for bust and be the first country in the world that decides that every house without exception must be connected to fibre.

There is a misunderstanding. The Minister knows Keel on Achill Island much better than I do. When the Web Summit came to Ireland, those high worth individuals stayed in Keel for the weekend to get the cobwebs out of their heads after all of the hard business in Dublin. They did all sorts of mad things like kite sailing on the worst October day. When high net worth individuals like that and who are into extreme sports go away, a place like Achill is ideal in the sense that it has cliffs, wild seas, surfing, kite surfing, cycling around the island, which these ones did, and so on.

They want the really rugged, hard stuff, but they also want one other thing in those very isolated but very attractive places and that is world-class broadband. They will stay the extra few days if they have New York broadband at the back of the mountain in Keel. If it is not there, they will get the hell out as fast as they can. While broadband is of paramount importance for local people, it is also paramount to attract the high net worth individuals who need constant contact to these places. They tend to gravitate to west Sligo, to the Achill's of this world. There are so many good reasons to connect every house, and the more isolated it is, the more important that is, both to the local and to the visitor. Will the Minister promise that he will make sure that the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Naughten, will connect every house? I hope there will be no talk of reaching 90% because 90% of the country leaves out 30% of those who live in rural Ireland because there are so many people in the cities. Will the Minister promise that it will be all houses and businesses, with no exceptions?