Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

I am delighted to contribute to this important debate on Ireland's broadband infrastructure. It is disappointing that we are having this debate once again. Standing up and telling Ministers how bad broadband roll-out has been seems to be an annual event.

It is ironic that during the previous Dáil, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Eamon Ryan, sat on the Opposition side of the House, along with Deputy Coveney and myself, as a spokesperson on communications. If the Minister had listened from these benches to the speech he gave last night, he would have been extremely disappointed.

It is often stated that in this sector, the regulator acting in the interests of the incumbent telecommunications company is due to regulatory capture. The Minister seems to have been subject to departmental capture. We see Ireland's continued poor showing on the OECD international broadband league tables and other calculations. Last night, we heard the Minister dispute the findings of these reports, which seems particularly petty and disingenuous.

The Minister stated that he had established an international advisory group to tell the Department what needs to be done to achieve national broadband roll-out. He will spend approximately €50,000 and will have a one-day briefing session on it. Most of what needs to be done is well known to the Department, Eircom and other operators and we simply need to get on with it.

ComReg has recorded approximately 800,000 broadband subscribers in the country. However, the rate of increase remains far too slow. We could have expected a natural increase as the usage of broadband and IT continues. It is demoralising to find the latest OECD figures put us in 22nd place out of 30 states. Portugal is the only one of the old 15 member states of the EU which ranks lower than Ireland.

This is why we find many distinguished communications business people such as the managing director of eBay Ireland, Mr. John McElligott, stating frankly that he is comprehensively disappointed by what has been achieved in broadband roll-out to date and highly concerned about the future. He is embarrassed to tell his peers in Europe and the United States of the poor levels of broadband in this country.

A key criticism which the Minister had in the previous Dáil when he was in Opposition was of the metropolitan area networks, MANs. He repeatedly told the then Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Michael Ahern, and the former Minister with responsibility for communications, Deputy Noel Dempsey, of the need for an early cost-benefit analysis of the MANs because while optical rings were being run around towns in the Dublin region, nothing was being achieved for ordinary households or businesses or for lower income groups. We will spend up to €175 million on the second phase of this project.

The need for this arose because of the botched privatisation of Eircom, for which we still suffer four or five Ministers later. We will have a great deal of expenditure on a second shadow national telecommunications network which, in many parts of the country, is a white elephant. What will the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Ryan, do about the MANs? He has been Minister for nine months but has achieved little.

The national infrastructure network roll-out needs firm leadership by the Minister. In the UK, under the former Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, a supremo for broadband roll-out was appointed and the British got on with it and greatly improved their ratings. We have not achieved this. The group rural broadband scheme was abandoned after a substantial amount of money was spent but little was achieved. The Minister is a great disappointment when compared with his role as an Opposition spokesperson.

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