Mr. Rory Fitzpatrick:

There is always such a fear. No matter what one does there will be a risk one has stepped in too early or too late. It is great the State is doing something at the moment. That is worth commending; it is brilliant something is being done. The issue with it is an infrastructural problem with which we have to deal. If the State were to step in and deliver a satellite-based solution that would present significant additional opportunities. Mr. Campbell spoke of the new systems coming down the line with the Eutelsat, VHTS and other services. If we were to go down that route, we would have an opportunity to tie in some of RTÉ’s broadcasting capacity in terms of Saorsat that is going out from Madrid. We have an opportunity to cater for the Defence Forces who are underprovided because they have to tender in Europe on piecemeal contracts. There is a much bigger opportunity here for the State to unify this. We are small country. We do not have a very big budget in this area. We certainly do not have the money to be putting up loads of satellites, especially not when there are guys putting 60 of them out every Thursday. This is an opportunity here.

The LEO service will be huge. If we consider what is coming into the market, Starlink and SpaceX are out in the lead but right behind them are Telesat, OneWeb, Amazon's Kuiper project and Apple is also talking about this; those are only the Californian guys. This is before we look at some European ventures that might come in. We are also looking at the Japanese, the Indians and the Russians. We could end up with 20 or 30 service providers with low orbit satellite provision. They will all help our end user consumer but they will not help the State on the difficult problems it has. The State should have some involvement in the communications infrastructure. Obviously, I would have because I have a teleport but this would also make sense for Mr. Campbell as it protects local business and the needs of the local market rather than the needs of the global market.