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

I remember I had concerns at the time about the ownership of the assets with regard to the national broadband plan, but not the underlying economic logic and rationale. There was reasonable cross-party consensus about proceeding even if there were concerns about aspects of it. In this country we can sometimes work to reach consensus in the political system. The deposit refund scheme worked because industry knew the political system was serious about it. It is similar with this. The political confidence behind it helped get the project over the line.

It has surprised everyone. In hindsight, had we known that Covid and remote working were coming, we would have doubled down on the case for it. They make the case stronger.

I agree with Deputy Bruton. One of the areas in which he State has not delivered is in the use of electronic digital communication systems, for health particularly. We are better placed on its use in education. In health, remote monitoring, remote diagnosis and remote clinics and consulting surely have to be used. The State has incredible resources at the moment but the scale of the increase in health expenditure is not sustainable. While we have had real benefits in terms of much better outcomes, longer lives and reduced wait times, at some point soon that massive increase in the budget each year will become unsustainable. There are other areas where we need to spend money so we cannot keep massively increasing health budgets.

There is a lot of stuff for consideration for any future programme for Government. The way in which we manage our digital policy is fragmented in this Government, if we are being honest. Our Department has a very strong role. It is particularly strong on the cybersecurity and network side where we are achieving real success. We will have pretty much universal broadband within the next three to four years which gives us a competitive advantage.

There are a number of different Departments involved, covering justice, enterprise, education and culture, not to mention health, and the issue of how we achieve an integrated policy, particularly with artificial intelligence, is important. It is not just the broadband network but in other evolving technologies that we need to ask how we make best use of them. We are not sufficiently well equipped as a State to do that in a really co-ordinated way. The answer is difficult. We could get into fantasy Cabinet discussions but our digital strategy, per se, needs to be much stronger in the next programme for Government. Organisation and collation will be key. We will work with the Department of Health but, in truth, providing the network is not enough; it is how it is used.