Ms Carolan Lennon:

Absolutely not. The Senator might say it was cherry-picking; I would say we picked the next most commercially viable homes because we were making a commercial investment. I remind everybody that the Department wrote to every operator in the country, told them it wanted to finalise this intervention footprint and asked them whether they had any plans to do more commercially. A number of operators submitted plans but the only operator that was willing to sign a commitment agreement and actually went ahead and delivered all those plans was Eir. That project involves €250 million of our money. If nobody goes on to the network, it is my problem. I take all the risk. If nobody connects, it costs €250 million. That has moved Eir from the provision of rural broadband up to the top percentile in Europe on the back of our investment. I take the Senator's point regarding service but if she looks at the chart we have presented, she will see that we have spent a higher percentage of our capital on investment in infrastructure in Ireland over the past number of years than all of the big telecommunications companies in the country. We are putting in the money and it is improving infrastructure in Ireland. As I say, if we were Google or Facebook, there would be a statue to us. We have history and people are sceptical but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. A total of 315,000 properties are covered but 340,000 farms, businesses and families will get access to fibre to the home on the back of Eir's investment.