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

The situation does not seem to be quite how I understood it. I believed that that funding could be used for any infrastructural shortfall in, for example, piers, roads, coastal erosion, health, education, power, communications, recreation or community. It could be obtained in all sorts of creative ways, for example, co-funding, solitary funding, part funding, total funding or with the Department as the main funder, other than the community. Does the Department track what projects would have needed to wait much longer in the queue due to cost-benefit analyses by the various providers if we did not have an island fund that could be used in so many creative ways to push projects forward and make them attractive? Previously, 50% funding was provided for health centres, which made it attractive for the HSE to move to somewhere. A cost-benefit analysis would usually decide between an island with 300 people and an urban area of 3,000 people, but when money suddenly appears on the table, providers want to do things. I can understand that. That was the whole idea of the fund. Since the piers are not fishing piers, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is not interested, so they are effectively 100% funded by the Department of Rural and Community Development. There was a similar arrangement in respect of electricity, where the Department handled the point-to-point work, the networks and so forth for ESB Networks, commonly called the ESB. Is the Department’s islands division looking at all aspects of island infrastructure and asking how to move projects up the back list by using its money pot instead of leaving them low down on the list due to being awkward to get to? Is such a proactive approach being taken or do the agencies just do what they want and the islands must take their turn?

My final question is very much directed to the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. It is a simple question. If I set off from Clonbur in my area towards Finny and go to Tonlegee or Glentraigue, there is no mobile signal. If I go into the Inagh Valley, which some of the witnesses will have heard of, or go around the Kylemore area – not just the abbey section of it, as Kylemore starts way before that turn – or Inishbofin, mobile signal is very poor. You can be quite deep inside a valley and be nowhere near a mobile signal. What progress has the task force made in taking in what should have been part of the contract from the very beginning – we sold the thing for a bit of extra money and sold 5% of the population short – in the past four or five years and what progress is planned to be made to cover these black spots? The map shows the situation. The witnesses all know the famous map. They can see the mountainous areas in Wicklow, Connemara and Donegal – the Cathaoirleach is lucky in Roscommon, as there are not too many mountains in east Galway – and that they still do not have mobile coverage.