Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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The targets and the contract are published on the Department's website. It is there for everybody to see exactly what Eir has signed up to. It will be reporting quarterly to us and we will be publishing those figures.

Taking Deputy Stanley’s example we are not selling land but putting infrastructure into it. It is more like we are draining the land. If we put a drain through the good 30 acres, the marginal land will benefit more. One has to go through the good land to get to the bad land anyway. We are going to have fibre built out to one third of farms across this country over the next 89 weeks. Whoever is the successful bidder, or bidders, for the final two thirds of farms which need broadband, they can plug into that network that is already constructed.

Part of the heavy lifting is done in relation to that.

We honestly do not know about costs and potential costs because we are in the procurement process so we will have to see what comes back on foot of that. Eir is spending €200 million of its own money. To answer Deputy Lowry's question, we have bound it to a contract which has built-in penalties. The detail of the penalties and their financial implications are confidential. That is one of the few things that is not on the contract that is available on the website. We have set binding targets for every single quarter over the next 89 weeks. Eir will return those figures to us and we will spot check those. It is very easy to see where the cable has or has not been laid. I have asked the officials to give me a full list of the areas across the country so as I travel around the country I can look and see for myself if the cable is on the poles or not. We will do individual spot-checks to see if they have passed a particular area. It is also our intention to publish that information as it becomes available to us. For example, in my own parish of Drum, where it has already brought the fibre out, people will tell you very quickly if Eir has said it has delivered broadband to that area and the cable is not there. By putting as much information as possible into the public domain, people will identify it very quickly. We will publish the targets as they are delivered upon on broadband.gov.ie, listing the areas where broadband has been provided. As the fibre is delivered to particular areas, they will turn from light blue to dark blue on the website, so people can see as it is being rolled out across the country.

On building on momentum, in a lot of cases subcontractors do this work. Many of those are working for all the operators. They will be able to continue on with the roll-out of that network. We hope to be in a position to have the vast majority of the country completed by 2020, based on the current rate of roll-out. Deputy Stanley is correct that the further down that road one gets, one will get to more isolated locations. That is why we have never given a definitive commitment that it will be a fibre solution to every single home. We have never given a definitive answer for when the last home will be connected because we just do not know. If we are talking about going up the side of a mountain, it is very difficult to say what the technical challenges are going to be for individual premises in individual locations. The last community in the country to get electricity was 40 or 50 years after the first one because of some of the technology challenges. I do not envisage anything like that happening on this occasion.

It is also important to remember that we already have two cable networks going to the vast majority of premises in Ireland already, the electricity network and the telephone network. In one form or another, all the operators are looking to piggy-back on some or all of that network so that should help to assist the physical roll-out of that network when the contract is ultimately awarded.