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

I thank the Minister for coming in. I believe in a social and equal Ireland and that means bringing broadband to every house, home and business in the country. That has to be the big aim of what we are trying to do. I was very critical of the plan that referred to 30 Mbps. I remember when we were talking about 5 Mbps sorting everybody out, then it became 30 Mbps. As early as 2012, I was firmly convinced that it was a gigabit or nothing. The only way of doing that is fibre to the home, FTTH. There has been a very interesting debate on this issue. One very good thing in respect of the physical feasibility of doing this is that Eir has already done 300,000 houses across the country from Ballyconneely and Roundstone up to Donegal - I do not know which little villages. It is running up the countryside from each old exchange that was built. People seem not to fully understand that. There is not a community in Ireland that has not now got a digital divide in it, including the rural community in which I live, Cornamona, where 100 houses have it and 300 or 400 houses do not. From those who have the FTTH I hear no complaints. Those who are 100, 200 or 300 yd. away are going absolutely crazy asking when they can get it. They want FTTH and they want it now. Everything is focused on that. Has the Minister information on the roll-out to the 300,000 houses? How much of it was on ESB poles, how much was on Eir poles and how much was underground? My impression is that they underground it where there is already a duct and where the Eir cable was underground, and they overground it along the poles everywhere there is the old Eir copper cable. I wish we could get rid of the old copper cable by putting in the fibre. I have not seen any approach into houses yet on the ESB side but I would be very interested to see if they did that. In lots of cases in rural Ireland the ESB pole is coming in from a totally different direction because the whole layout is not along the route. The Minister might clarify that point.

Can the Minister give information to the committee as to how many nodes, as I call them, of fibre are now in every county in Ireland? I know they are on the Eir map and the Department's map. There is a node of fibre running out about a mile in every direction from each of these old exchanges. It seems to me that for anybody to build a total alternative system would be crazy when the core of the system is there. There is plenty of fibre as far as it goes and then it suddenly stops. To continue on to the next house, one just links in. We need to have a debate about how this is really configured on the ground as of today, not what the Minister might do if he was starting again.

If the take-up exceeds the projection, does the cost to the State decrease? If the State gets a much bigger penetration or if, despite what Deputy Eamon Ryan says, a lot of people build along the lines that are going to be there anyway and want to connect in and we therefore get a lot more people connecting into this, does the cost decrease? It is very interesting to watch what happened to ordinary telephone lines in the 1970s and 1980s. Eventually they went to a peak of about 95% penetration before the mobile phone came in. It suddenly took off and everybody, rural and urban, wanted it. The Department was publishing figures for a while, until it stopped, on take-up. What is the pattern of take-up when FTTH is provided in urban areas and in rural areas per 100 houses? There is a time lag between FTTH coming in and its being taken up. Is there as fast a rise in the graph in the urban and rural areas? I do not perceive a major difference between urban and rural.

On price regulation, the €30 per month for anybody connected to this system is independent of any other regulated price that is going to exist it in the market. Could the Minister confirm that? Were all the observations of all Departments published? If not, why not? I have reasonable respect for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform but it does take a negative view on most things. It has done so before in the history of the State. It can also totally misunderstand things at times. I remember a classic case when I had dealings with the Department about a pier on Inis Oirr. My colleagues will be amused at this one. The answer I got back was that there was no need for a pier on Inis Oirr because we had just built a very expensive pier on Inis Mór. That showed an incredible lack of information about how islands work. The Minister gets the point. Also, looking at the wording of the memo, what the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform seems to be telling us is that rural Ireland can wait. It is worth looking at this. There are 1.1 million people, forgetting about the figures for the houses because there are some holiday homes there, and they love the broadband, by the way. Most of us use broadband every day and, when they put it into old people's houses where they are being monitored by family members and so on, it is going to be used every day. Let us say that in ten years time, 600,000 people will be using this every day. That is only 50% of them, at a cost of €3 billion. I looked it up on the web and got a figure that only 150,000 people are expected to use the new metro every day. Per head of population this is working out as a very cheap technology. I think BusConnects is something like €1 million. To my way of thinking, this is quite cheap technology. It is also going to solve one of Deputy Eamon Ryan's dilemmas. If we get all this broadband, we will have to do a lot less travelling. Many people who now travel every day to work will be able to work from home. It will reduce the carbon footprint.

I congratulate the Minister because there is joined-up thinking in the Department. This is a game changer. None of us in rural Ireland with any kind of broadband ever goes to a travel agent or people like that to book tickets. We do not go there. It is the same problem with the post offices because people do not go to them anymore; they just do it at home without any carbon footprint. Contrary to what many others think, this will dramatically reduce carbon footprints.

It will also deal with a congestion problem in the cities. For example, half of the people working in the massive industrial estates east of Galway city come from rural Galway. If they could do some of their work from home, it would reduce the congestion at the busy times because they could choose when to go to work in the city. This also has a major urban benefit.

Supposing we scrap this plan and start again, am I right in thinking that the State could no longer give this job to a commercial State company without a procurement programme because it is a deregulated industry? Is that right or wrong under EU law? Unlike what we can thankfully still do with the ESB and the water network, am I right that the State could build this through a commercial entity without a procurement? We need clarification on that. Perhaps I am wrong and the Minister could tell a commercial State agency to build it and the State would own it. We need clarity on that because there seems to be some doubt.

All the people want broadband now and I get more queries about broadband than anything else. They want to know if the successful bidder must roll this out across the country, if the target of providing for 133,000 premises is for the first two years and so on, or can it cherry-pick? Eir was very fair in the way it went around the country, doing small and big places at the same time. Can the successful bidder cherry-pick which premises it supplies? For example, in the early years of the roll-out, could the successful bidder keep to areas near the towns where there would be many more houses per km and leave large swathes of the west of Ireland until the very end, five, six or seven years later? Does the successful bidder have to roll this out in an equitable way?