Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

What Mr. Mulligan said is right. I am not dreaming of stopping what is going. I would not in my wildest dreams. However, what I would also say is that Government has to be proactive, and has to go way beyond where the commercial company is going to go. The Government might have to directly fund it, as it did with NBI, and say, "Hang on a second. If we leave it to the commercial market, it ain't going to happen".

I want the Government, with the Department of Rural and Community Development taking the lead, to survey all the islands and see whether it would be optimal from the islands' point of view to improve electricity supply and resilience at the State's expense and to install fibre and water infrastructure and anything else that could be connected to the mainland at the same time. All of the islands should be surveyed and the Government should then provide a programme of fundamental infrastructure upgrades to islands over and above what commercial companies would prioritise. The Government should give the money directly to the companies to do the job, which is basically what happened in the case of National Broadband Ireland, NBI. Nowadays, that would probably have to be cleared as appropriate state aid and so on.

This is why the Department exists. Without it, after cost-benefit analyses, the islands would always be at the bottom of the pack. The whole idea of a Department responsible for the islands was to jump over such analyses and to use a special ring-fenced island fund to make things happen as soon as possible. That can be done in a cost-effective way by taking a cross-cutting approach rather than addressing things individually, such as through someone going in and putting in fibre alone. The islands division needs to drive this and to organise these upgrades. There are precedents for this in the past. European money was used to bring electricity to the islands and then the Department, when it was my Department, dealt with a few tail-end islands that did not have electricity: Inishturk South, Inishturbot, Coney Island and so on. We funded those works directly from the Department. Companies were left to do the distribution but we provided the point-to-point works from the mainland to the islands. We asked whether the companies would use the connections and, of course, they did.