Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 9 November 2017

Public Accounts Committee

2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 29 - Communications, Climate Action and Environment

9:00 am

Mr. Mark Griffin:

I will deal with that issue in a second, but first I will give the Deputy some figures. It is important that I do because I do not want people to be under the impression that things have not been happening in the past few years. In 2012 some 700,000 properties were connected to high speed broadband. By April 2016 the figure had increased to 1.2 million or 52% of premises. In September 2017, 1.5 million or 65% of premises had access to high speed broadband. By the end of next year the figure will be 1.8 million or 77% of premises and by the end of 2020 it will be 2.1 million or 90% premises. A huge amount is happening and what one is seeing is a significant ramping up by the commercial sector. We had eir 300,000, which was launched in April this year and on which the Minister signed a commitment agreement. We had SIRO, which agreed to invest €450 million in 51 towns, providing 500 connections across the State. Virgin Media has agreed to extend its footprint, while enet decided to invest €100 million in 115,000 premises in nine locations in the west and north west.

I have heard Deputies across the House refer to the national broadband plan as the next rural electrification scheme. Back in 1927 those involved in the rural electrification scheme did not have to deal with public procurement procedures. If they did, it might have been delayed a lot longer and some of us might still be in the dark. The reality is that we have to comply fully with public procurement procedures. I would much prefer to have a process that was robust and that stood up to scrutiny should any party involved in the procurement process decide to take the State to court by way of a judicial review at the end of it.

We actually put the project out to tender in December 2015. After the first phase, the pre-qualification questionnaire, we had five consortia, comprising 32 companies. All of them had to be evaluated. We had to enter into detailed dialogue with the companies that were still part of the process. We are talking about a contract that runs to about 1,500 pages. It is a very complex procurement process. While I understand the frustration, I would be much more comfortable in having a robust procurement process over which the Minister, the Department and I could stand at the end, having delivered a preferred tender or tenderer in a position to hit the ground running to deliver high speed broadband to the 542,000 properties without high speed broadband.

There was also an intention to establish a mobile phone and broadband task force - a clear commitment of the Minister when he came into government - and that has taken place. It has done a lot of work on the intermediate steps that could be put in place to remedy some of these inefficiencies, especially around mobile phone signal issues across the State. The Minister has optioned the additional spectrum at 3.6 GHz, which will provide spectrum to private sector companies to roll out broadband. The Minister has also facilitated RTÉ by way of providing €8 million in the Vote in 2016 in order that it can exit-----