Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

If it is a parliamentary party meeting one would just be better off inviting a journalist in so that he or she could record it accurately.

I have some questions for Dr. O'Connor. I will bring him back to the mobile phone and broadband task force. I was very surprised to see this particular task force put into abeyance at the start of the year. As Dr. O'Connor is aware, many of the challenges we came across this year in network capacity were dealt with because of the work done over the past three years by the mobile phone and broadband task force. If that task force had not been established a number of years ago, our network probably would have collapsed on quite a few more occasions than it did over the past nine months.

Due to the capacity issues with our network, right across Europe the EU asked Netflix and other video channels to reduce the capacity of their streaming services. The quality was disimproved in order to take pressure off the network. Here in Ireland, ComReg did the same thing with the mobile network. Our voice services were diminished in quality in order to increase the capacity of data, 4G and 3G services. There are clearly deficiencies within the existing networks in a European context but also in our mobile and wireless networks here in Ireland if ComReg took that decision.

I have gone on to the website downdetector.ie, which logs reported problems with various online networks. This issue came to the fore last Friday night. I happen to be a Vodafone customer. I was watching the "Late Late Show" on Friday night and was frustrated, like everyone else, by what happened when the service went down on a number of occasions during the show. That brought to the fore what is taking place on a regular basis. During the most recent lockdown, there were 24 reported service outages, according to downdetector.ie. Vodafone, Three, Virgin Media, Eir and Imagine all went down at different times over the last six weeks. Clearly, there are ongoing problems with our broadband network and our mobile network in particular. Surely it makes sense, at this stage and in light of those capacity problems, to re-energise the mobile phone and broadband task force rather than put it in abeyance. Can someone explain to me why, at a time when unprecedented pressure was put on our mobile networks, the liaison between the Government, the industry and the various players around the country was shelved? Why did that happen? What is the future of that task force?