Mr. Ciarán Ó hÓbáin:

The Chair has given views on a range of points and asked a number of questions. I will focus on the questions. I will start from the bottom up with two points. In his opening remark, the Chair referenced Covid and said it was being blamed and used as an excuse. He also questioned whether Covid was a reason for the delays. I have to deal with that upfront. Covid was the most significant reason and has had the greatest impact on the national broadband plan being six months behind. That is not an excuse; it is just a reality. We have lived through a pandemic and it has impacted every business in the State and how it operates.

The Chair is correct that telecommunications was a service that was allowed to continue through Covid but Mr. Mulligan already has outlined some of the issues and challenges around recruitment, mobilisation of key contractors, supply chain and logistic delays. The Chair mentioned the Kelly contractor. It has been replaced but there is an immediate impact of not having one of the key contractors there. There were travel restrictions in Ireland. These people have to be on the road building networks and surveying. They would normally be staying in hotels and bed and breakfasts. They could not, so journey times are longer. The recruitment process took longer. Can the Chair imagine if a group of us here today tried to do a redesign of something we were involved in, like NBI was trying to do in designing a network, and having to do that over Zoom as opposed to at a whiteboard? It was a difficult time. It is not an excuse or a question of blame. It is stating a reason. It is a matter of fact that Covid has impacted.

Looking to the year ahead, the impact continues because things that did not happen in that first period impact on timelines for the next period. As for the number that is there for next year, NBI has stated it is 130,000 to 144,000. The Department will challenge every aspect of what NBI submits to it in the coming weeks in relation to what it can deliver next year. As Mr. Mulligan has outlined, where relief is granted it can be granted, but delays are delays.

I am not going to prejudge what will come to us or what the outcome of the Department's assessment of that will be but the assessment will be the same as it was in 2021, namely, an intensive scrutiny of what NBI put forward as being the reality of the world it faced and the challenge that it faced. The Chairman has offered a view but I must defend and assert that the team of people from the Department who looked at the issue did their job and did it well. They had external advisers to assist them where the technical, financial or commercial expertise was not available in-house and we used people in-house as well. I must stand over the job that was done and say that they came up with the right decision on that. They were hard in their engagement and scrutiny of what was before them and will continue to be so.

The Chairman referenced the task force. He obviously feels quite strongly about it. I am aware that he has a history in relation to its establishment. Reflecting back on what the task force was established for, it was very much in advance of the National Broadband Plan, NBP. It was when Ireland was in a procurement process for a national broadband plan and there was not a company there to deliver that plan that could engage for itself in terms of what it was going to need to do. The task force was very effective and delivered over 70 actions over three years. It had a much longer life in that period than had been anticipated because the procurement took longer than any of us wanted.

The Chairman is correct to state that the task force last meet in October 2019. There might be a perception out there that people have done nothing since and the work has not continued; it absolutely has. One of the core issues that the task force focused on was access to infrastructure, the licensing regime with local authorities and developing contributions, and it took actions that were successful. However, after the international broadband contract was signed, the world had moved to a new place, where we were not talking about doing things in advance of a potential contract that the Government might agree to; we were talking about the implementation of a contract that the Government had signed. If the Chairman is looking for evidence of action, the contract was signed on 19 November 2019. One day later, the CCMA had its regular quarterly meeting with the Department. At those meetings, those at CEO level of local authorities meet the Secretary General of the Department and the assistant secretaries general responsible for specific areas. There is a four- or five-item agenda. One day after the contract was signed, the national broadband plan was on the agenda for that meeting. It has been on the agenda for every meeting the Department has had with the CCMA since.

Colleagues in the Department of Rural and Community Development managed the telecoms advisory group. That group met on 13 December 2019. It met nine times in 2020, has met seven times in 2021, and I believe it is meeting tomorrow. Our Departments work together through that group. As the committee has already heard today, National Broadband Ireland uses that group as a conduit for the transfer of information back and forth with the local authorities. Every local authority is represented by the broadband officers.

The section 254 licences were recognised as being a critical issue, which has been raised by National Broadband Ireland. In the early days of the engagement, we pressed National Broadband Ireland as hard as they might be pressing the State today in terms of its level of performance, in that we were pressing them to ensure they had the team in place with the right skill sets and the right bandwidth to deal with every local authority in Ireland, which have a range of other projects coming at them as well. I believe that today, National Broadband Ireland has that team in place. Guidance was developed by the Departments, working in conjunction with the Local Government Management Agency, LGMA, the CCMA, the Roads Management Office, RMO, and the broadband officers. The two Departments that are represented here today and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage were involved in bilateral meetings. There was extensive engagement there. That culminated in new guidance being delivered to all local authorities and the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, addressing a conference with senior representatives of every local authority in May of last year, just when the build programme was taking off and at the time when section 254 applications were going to become live. The number of such applications received to date are not as high as they will be in the next year, so that guidance is critical.

Since the guidance was put in place, a steering group was established, which involves our Department, National Broadband Ireland, the CCMA and the RMO. Effectively, it is a troubleshooting house to deal with issues that arise, because we know that when you get down to individual areas there will always be unforeseen issues that will crop up.

I must push back very hard against any contention that the work of the task force has not continued. Even when you step outside of the actual broadband space, from May 2020, the power of the work of the task force was that it brought national Departments, State bodies, local authorities, telecommunications companies and regulators together. That has continued. When we found ourselves in a pandemic where people without good broadband were going to have to rely on mobile broadband and when there was an immediate spike of more than 40% in voice traffic and 20% in data traffic and networks could potentially be challenged, actions were taken there. Our Department worked with the telecommunications companies and with ComReg. It also worked with the Department of Education on issues in that space. The work that the task force began has been powerful. The relationship and the collaboration, which it has instilled as a way of working in Ireland, has continued.

In terms of the actual forum itself, the two Departments are at a very advanced stage of developing a work programme to put to the Ministers to agree for the next phase of the work of the task force. However, the fundamental point I wish to make is that in terms of the NBP and its roll-out, there is nothing that would have been achieved with a task force meeting. In fact, the energy that was invested in what I have just described and in new engagements, which were more appropriate to circumstances where there was a contract in place rather than a potential for a broadband plan, has actually been a powerful tool in ensuring that we are as far advanced as we are with the plan today.

I am conscious that the Chairman raised a number of other questions, which we should go back over. I will deal with one of them. He referenced the EU definition of state aid. We are interested in that from the perspective that we may find ourselves having completed the commercial roll-out of the NBP plan that I have described, and with an ambition of gigabit broadband in Ireland. There may be dots around our country and we may need to consider how we might deal with them. We are interested in that. Principally, the issue for Ireland is more the digital compass, which is that gigabit ambition, which is where we are going.

I welcome the Chairman's positive commentary around the marts. Perhaps Mr. Neary might respond on the landline issue and Mr. Mulligan might speak to the communications strategy. I believe I have covered most of the Chair's points, but if we have missed any of them, he can come back to us. I am aware that he is due in the Chamber.