Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 5 November 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport
National Broadband Plan and Network Resilience: National Broadband Ireland
2:00 am
Mr. T.J. Malone:
I think the Deputy hit the nail on the head. It is really important. As we go into next year, we will have what we call the bring it home campaign. With this, every county in Ireland will have full access when the NBP finishes so from June onwards next year, and we think it will be incumbent on everybody here, every Minister and every TD, to really push the importance of this for the digital economy. We spent some time with the Minister on the Aran Islands recently and he mentioned at the time we were great at building infrastructure for people to leave this country. Now we are building an infrastructure, so that people can reside in any part of the country no matter how remote it is. We talked to people on the island who are now able to compete on a world-wide basis from their home in Achill from a business point of view and it is about getting that message out. Obviously, we have a huge role in doing that and the service providers that sell our products do as well. For the investment that has gone into this network and the network that we have, it really is important. Next year we take over the EU Presidency, so with that in mind it is hugely important that everybody pushes on this.
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