Ms Carolan Lennon:

There are 315,000, soon to be 340,000, people on farms, in businesses and families who have access to fibre in the home today and nothing has happened on the national broadband plan. That was all at Eir's cost, which amounted to €250 million without taxpayer or State subsidy or risk to the State. All the risk is on us if nobody goes onto that network. We answered a request from the Department, made a decision, delivered what we said we would, and I am proud of the work we have done there.

The reality is that we would have built it anyway, whether we had signed a commitment agreement or not, but the Department is very keen for us to sign a commitment agreement and agree to just over 300,000 specific postcodes. If I was doing it again, I would not agree to 300,000 specific postcodes because, when one gets out to build in rural Ireland, one finds there are things which stop one going down certain roads and it can be time consuming and not as efficient as picking the most effective 300,000 households. At the time, the Department was keen for us to sign it and we did.