Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his opening statement and I thank the Department for the briefing note.

I welcome the progress that has been made. The Minister of State has been before the committee previously. For a time, Deputy Ó Murchú covered this end of things for Sinn Féin. We have gone through the granular details of this project. It is most welcome to see many of the barriers starting to unravel and the scale, for which we hoped, coming on stream.

Initially, there was talk about trimming some time off the end of this project in terms of the overall timeframe for the roll-out. This issue has cropped up from time to time. In fairness, Covid did interrupt things. Given the scale and capacity of the system, however, is there a prospect of reducing the time involved? I presume that this is an issue that is kept under review.

I wish to mention a current problem. It is one that will increase in the future when the national broadband plan is fully rolled out. I refer to the situation, which has already arisen, of urban areas where there is poor-quality broadband. The commercial viability of going back into those areas for the providers is pretty low. There are a number of examples of this right across the State, including in my constituency. I know from some of the providers, the likes of SIRO and others, that they have talked about a mini-national broadband plan and a Dutch auction for bundling together these hard-to-reach areas. Is that matter on the radar of the Minister of State? Has he given consideration to it?