Mr. Kevin O'Donoghue:

We did start looking at an engagement with the local authority sector because of the difficulties that were there at the start. We secured funding of €6 million from the Government. We have offered it to the local authority system, €2 million a year for three years. Each of them has come back. We are one year into it. We are starting to look at the outcomes from it. We will work with the Road Management Office, RMO, as well as part of that to ensure we are working with the shared service with responsibility for it.

As Mr. Malone pointed out, however, the length of time for decisions has dropped dramatically as a result of the fact that we have requested specific directors of services to take responsibility in each local authority for the engagement with the broadband roll-out. It is up to them then how they spend the money, but it is to be done for the determination of licences and for the engagement they need to have.

We have also started a series of regional engagements with the local authorities. We do two in each region each year. I was in Kerry in September with a colleague of mine. Mr. Mulligan was with us for that engagement. We were in Sligo the week before last. We will be in Longford on 23 November. We bring the local authorities together in order that they can discuss with one another any of the difficulties they are having and how other local authorities are resolving them. As regards specific queries that come up where NBI is having some difficulty, it contacts us. It has a specific person who engages with the local authorities. We meet that person regularly. If there is a specific query causing concern, we will step in as a Department and get involved and see what we can do to resolve the query. In some instances the queries the local authority has are perfectly valid. In some instances it is just a matter of finding the right person within the local authority to sign off the particular issue. In general, the engagement with the local authority sector has become an awful lot better. On a semi-regular basis, we go to the climate action, transport, circular economy and networks, CATCEN, committee and update the local authority sector at County and City Management Association, CCMA, level generally as to where we are with them. We have much better contacts with the right people in each local authority. The broadband officers also come along to those regional meetings. We are trying to ensure that the provision of information to the system and within the system where they are talking to one another is able to resolve the queries.