Mr. Conal Henry:

Deputy Colreavy asked whether we work with the Government on developing a vision. The relationship between policy and industry is far stronger and deeper than it has ever been in my eight years' experience in telecommunications in Ireland. The next generation broadband task force was an excellent development as it formally invited the CEOs of the major telecommunications companies - one can discuss whether e|net is a major company but I was one of those CEOs - and the dialogue was instructive for policy and the industry. On a quarterly basis e|net has the opportunity to discuss our business and wider issues through the arrangements in place with our concession agreement. This quarterly liaison process works well and includes officials from the Department and a local authority county manager. It is an excellent process in which to discuss issues. While it is focused on issues associated with the metropolitan area networks, the dialogue is instructive for us all. There is always room for more discussion and sharing but I do not have fears about a lack of access to policymakers or concerns that we cannot get our views across to policymakers.

The point made on the State and the semi-State sector not exploiting the technology and changing the way we work is correct, but relative to our colleagues in France, Germany and the UK I do not believe we are any worse off. Good work is being done. The Revenue online service is excellent technology. The work being done on HEAnet with regard to third level and second level institutions can be breakthrough. I will not mention the name of a particular school because I do not have its permission to do so, but it is in receipt of 100 Mb broadband and all first year pupils have been given an iPad instead of a set of books. This is transformational, as much for the orthopaedic health of the pupils as anything else. The Department of Finance has a vision on how it wants to aggregate central services, and areas of the public sector are doing very interesting things. It could be brought up a level and made more visionary and coherent, but this is a challenge that exists in the public service in its entirety.

To answer Deputy Phelan, the landscape in Ireland is definitely an issue. We have a sparsity of population and the bungalow in the corner of a field effect. It is far more cost effective to deploy networks to clusters of buildings. We do not have clusters of buildings, we have large numbers of isolated buildings and this makes the average cost per home in Ireland significantly higher than the average cost per home in other countries. If one wanted to fix Ireland's broadband problem and decided to forget about the industry and just write a cheque to fix it once and for all, it would cost approximately €2 billion. This is big, but not that big. This is not what we suggest doing, but if one were Roman Abramovich and decided to bring fibre to every home in Ireland, this is what it would cost.

The motorways were not a missed opportunity. Most of them were built with ducting, which is piping along the side, and this removes 90% of the cost of building a fibreoptic network. The other 10% is with regard to deploying the fibre. However, we have concerns about what has been done as it has not been particularly well mapped so it is not exactly clear what is in place. We also believe the current charging structure is a little high. However, these can be changed so opportunities exist and we will certainly pursue them.

I apologise to Deputy O'Mahony for what happened at the weekend.