Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent)
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The reason I am asking this is that both the Minister's own Secretary General, Mr. Robert Watt, who has spoken before this committee on a number of occasions, and not on some occasions when we wanted to see him, and his colleagues put forward what is referred to as plan Z. Those of us who are now backbenchers but who might like to be Ministers see that as a fairly fast incremental process to build out fibre optic nodes to go to approximately 900 strategic central points, from where it would be taken further with the existing network and with 5G. It seems to me to be a reasonable plan and it may be what is implemented, depending on what happens in the next number of months. It is a reasonable plan, is it not? It is one that should have been seriously considered.

The Minister, Deputy Bruton, referred to the great Donogh O'Malley, who was one of our greatest Ministers and who introduced free second level education. He went to my alma mater one night and just announced he was going to do it. The Minister's analogy was not a fair one, in a sense, because the structure of the broadband roll-out was profoundly affected by the decision to sell what is now Eir.

We keep coming back to that. What drives constituents crazy and what they regard as a flawed plan with the current bid is that we will not own it. Whatever the asset is, we will not own it. They see this as a chance, even for one fifth of the network, to start getting the State back to where it should always have been, that is, holding onto the national electronic network and protecting our digital independence and so on. We are not doing that. Is that not the worst feature of this plan? Why has the Government not gone with plan Z? Why are we not holding on to our infrastructure? We are largely paying for it.