Mr. Ciarán Ó hÓbáin:

I accept your comments, Chairman. We will continue to engage on the mapping exercise, but the most proactive thing that is happening, which will resolve the issue not just for those people who have under 30 Mbps today or are on that borderline and are in a blue area, is that the commercial operators in this country that are currently serving those areas are engaged in a very significant ramp up of a roll-out of fibre to the home. We are talking today about circumstances where somebody might or might not be above or below the 30 Mbps. That is not the future, it is not the ambition for the future and it is not where Ireland is going. If that was 100 Mbps and if the European Commission had settled on 100 Mbps or on a gigabit, those people would be in a different place from the majority of people in urban areas and from all the people in rural areas who are served by the national broadband plan. That is the most significant thing that is happening. However, I absolutely accept your comment about the communication to the public on it.

To run quickly through the questions, and we will come back on the list of marts, the 60,000 is almost all rural. In terms of the question on the BCPs and the broader area, I will have to refer back to the committee. We will provide the Ballinasloe update. On the point about where the Senator is living, we are seeing instances of that. It is replicated throughout the country because of the ribbon nature of the development of the commercial operators' networks. Typically, they have built out in villages and have come out of the village to a certain degree on the more populated roads and stopped. Depending on how close that village is to the next village, there will be that middle ground. National Broadband Ireland will be picking up that right across Ireland. Its roll-out plan is focused on that.

On the BCP, the question was about whether these were in more isolated locations and therefore they would not be in areas to which National Broadband Ireland would be as invested in rolling out its network. NBI has no choice. The contract is a contract to deliver high-speed broadband to 544,000 premises, and that is increasing as new builds take place. Its deployment plan deliberately does not go after the easiest-to-reach homes first or the largest centres of population first. It is built out methodically from exchanges and then built out in a ring around that. It has to get to everybody. That is what the contract provides for, so there is no question that somebody should be concerned that because he or she is in a more remote and less populated area he or she will not be delivered the connectivity that is going to happen elsewhere in the plan.

Does Mr. Neary have an update on Ballinasloe?