Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I particularly want to hone in on that last point. It is one that I have raised a few times at committee meetings in recent months. A co-location policy was introduced in Ireland nine or ten years ago, through which there was to be a decent roll-out of mobile phone masts nationwide to ensure that signal would be maximised. However, that principle has been abandoned by the sector and the big companies in the past number of years. If you go into an urban centre, there is a concentration of mobile phone masts on around the local Garda station, the cathedral, the school roof and the church roof. The triangulation is huge and there is a strong signal. The companies do not want to share space because it is more lucrative to build their own masts and lease them out. If you go four or five miles outside an urban centre, the technology is simply not there. It should be a major concern for the committee that the old principle in the planning legislation for co-location has been abandoned to the detriment to some parts of rural Ireland. We still see a flood of applications for masts in urban centres. There is a happy medium. It is called a nationwide network. Some of the companies are still shying away from that.

I will move on. As Mr. Campbell was speaking, I made two notes on comments he made that captured my interest. He said that full fibre broadband is the ultimate. We all agree on that. It is what the country aspires to. One particular concern is that Mr. Campbell stated that people are holding back on paying the €200 installation charge because they are uncertain as to when their community or household will get fixed line broadband. Therein lies a major problem. I hope Mr. Campbell will respond to that. We have been told that the roll-out of the national broadband plan will take seven years. If representatives of the national broadband plan appear before the committee in the coming months, I imagine that they will tell us that the roll-out is behind schedule because of the Covid-19 pandemic and whatnot. The roll-out will take approximately seven years. Some people are very fortunate. They look up the national broadband map, hone in on their house or Eircode postcode and know that broadband will be installed in their area in three, four or six months. They can live with that. When people know something is coming, they accept it and plan around it. For those who might be getting their fixed line broadband in years five, six or seven of the roll-out, they do not know when it will happen, and Mr. Campbell has articulated that here today. I propose that the committee recommends that based on what Mr. Campbell has said, there should be State intervention on a scaled basis - scaled subsidisiation - whereby if residents are to get broadband in years five, six or seven of the roll-out, they should get 100% subsidisation, which should be scaled back according to each year of the roll-out. I ask Mr. Campbell for his views on what I have said as an addendum to the point he made earlier.