Mr. Ciarán Ó hÓbáin:

I thank the Senator, who raises a good question in terms of getting broadband to the people who need it most. Within the Department, we measure in terms of “premises”, and that is the word we use, but if we look down through the narrative, it repeatedly refers to “households”, “businesses” and “schools”. The committee members are public representatives, so they are out there all of the time, meeting a very wide range of people and not just within their constituencies, so they cannot help but get it. The two men in the room with me from the Department have been working on this for almost a decade and I am almost four years working on it. As public servants working on a project like this, we cannot help but get the human impact of the absence of broadband. It varies. It could be educational, it could be that people are in the kind of household that uses the Internet just in their daily and social lives, it could be they are trying to run a business or it could be they cannot work where they want to work from and the opportunities are not there. We get it.

The approach that has been taken to the national broadband plan is that nobody gets left behind. We did not try to rank people on the basis of “living more remotely”, or “further from” or “the cost of”. When we get to the most difficult to reach premises, there has to be a check in terms of the cost and an alternative strategy might be found. However, the philosophy of the broadband plan is that it has to get to everybody and we treat everybody equally.

In terms of the deployment, if we had attempted to take an approach that said we will identify premises or locations that are deemed a higher priority, we would not be looking at a seven-year roll-out plan and I think we would be looking at a 15-year roll-out plan to get to the people at the end of it. We might get to that 70% or 80% within the seven years but the last 30% would be awfully slow. The approach that has been taken is not that far removed from the approach that was taken with the vaccine roll-out, when we went away from the very elderly people in nursing homes or health workers and it was done on an age basis. The roll-out of the broadband plan is on a logical basis for rolling out a telecommunications network to the total of the deployment area that it has to reach. It comes out of the exchanges it is building from and it then connects, basically, in a ring around where it has come out from. Unfortunately, that means the reality is that in each deployment area we reach, there is a mix of people in terms of the value they will get from that broadband on day one, and in each deployment area that is at the end of the roll-out, there is a mix of people in terms of the value they will get from it. There are a very significant of number of people in every deployment area whose day-to-day lives are negatively impacted on the basis of not being able to access a reliable service.

All I can say to the Senator is that in terms of the Department and the governance of the contract, we are very clear on what came out of the tendering process and the contract in terms of a seven-year build. We are at a place today where there is a variety of circumstances, principally related to Covid and things we would expect to find in any mobilisation, that means National Broadband Ireland is about six months behind in that delivery. For all of the engagement we have had with NBI, and NBI can speak for itself, it has said it believes it will deliver this inside seven years. The Department will continue to work with it and to lean on it in terms of meeting that target but being ambitious in getting well short of that. We do get it in terms of how important this is to people. We will do our utmost to ensure the programme that has been committed to by National Broadband Ireland is delivered, and delivered on time.