Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

We are acutely aware of the frustration of people up and down the country who are not included in the roll-out over the next year to two years and beyond. It is critical that we look at that aspect. As Mr. Griffin said, we have nearly 50 people working on this programme in the Department and we are working diligently every week with the NBI team. The contract is with NBI, which is negotiating with every subcontractor - Eircom, Enet and any other company that it can get its hands on - to help to speed up this roll-out. The process is ongoing. NBI has a dedicated team dealing with those negotiations. A successful outcome has already been achieved in the negotiation with Eircom. From October this year, Eircom has ramped up the speed of upgrading the pole and duct network. That will set the platform for all other increases in capacity and speed that we hope to achieve. The priority now is to make up the ground lost to the impact of Covid-19, and we hope to do that over the next year. Beyond that, the absolute priority is to hasten the deployment scheduled for 2024 and 2025. We are working on that now.