Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 27 January 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

National Broadband Plan Update: National Broadband Ireland

Mr. T.J. Malone:

To put the project into perspective, we are working through that to finish out with the Eir rapid response crews. Once we noticed there were issues in getting works finished up and tidied up, we engaged with Eir, which came to the table and produced those rapid response crews. It could not be done overnight and it took some time to do it, but Eir has worked with us to get to that stage.

We are still working on acceleration of the programme. As Mr. Hendrick said in his opening statement, we got agreement with Eir to give us additional capacity in the ducting and the poling for a go-forward position. Most of the ducting will be absorbed into bringing the programme back on track to get us up to the seven years. To accelerate beyond seven years is contingent upon one of two things happening. Either we can get additional capacity from Eir to go faster with the Eir Make Ready works so that we can come behind that or we get what we would call a self-install product that is fit for purpose in the market.