James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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I greatly welcome the representatives from NBI here to the meeting. I greatly enjoyed the experience of going on-site to see the work that is being done. The expenditure around broadband in Ireland is obviously a very contentious issue. It is hard for the public to see the physical scale of the demands that are being put on the organisation. In the NBI’s defence, from an opening point of view I want to make clear that from what I saw, the project seems to be as well run as it possibly can be done at this point, particularly with the challenges of Covid-19. I thought, when going out to see the site installation and office set-up out near Citywest, that it was quite impressive, despite the issues raised today and others.

The first thing I wish to raise which made me laugh, was when I got a text message yesterday after telling constituents that NBI was going to appear before the committee. The lady who sent the text was giving out to me about one of the site installations NBI had done in a rural area called Inch. Inch is a very small rural settlement roughly between the towns of Fermoy, Youghal and Midleton.