Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is built into the contract and in a sense, success here benefits everyone. It is successful in the volume of connections and the increase of revenue to NBI and, obviously, the householders themselves. It also reduces the overall cost of the programme.

My understanding is that the level of connections has actually exceeded what was expected. I understand the question the Deputy asked is, if we have already passed 254,000 but only 80,000 are connected, what is with the other 160,000 or so? That, by industry standards, has been a very good uptake. It is probably higher than what was expected in the original business plans. It is up to 40%, and we do expect it to get up to 100,000 by the end of the year, out of some 300,000 passed premises. It really is working well. If anything, what we may have to do is look for further funding to accelerate it further and to be able to more quickly deliver.