Brian Stanley (Laois, Sinn Fein)
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I was using an analogy.

Reverting to the discussion and to the Minister's aspiration to bring high-speed broadband to every home in Ireland by one means or another - I am not particularly hung up on how it is done - the implication is that every home would have access to fibre broadband or its nearest available equivalent. One has to ask how that aspiration can be squared with the notion of a television licence. Going back to the days of Martin Corry, the State was so afraid of radios that it thought it had the right to prevent people having them in their homes unless they had licences for them. This was long before television. Radio was considered something the State had to control completely. One had to have a permit to have a radio set in one's house. That was the situation. The television licence is the younger brother or sister of that arrangement. It is completely inconsistent philosophically to say that there will be high-speed broadband in every house, on the one hand, and that people need a licence to have a television set in their house, on the other. Curiously, we had a reference to my house in Roscommon so I might as well say one thing on it. We made a decision not to have a television in that house-----