Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

To be fair to Mr. Albert Reynolds, he was the first one who really gave a push to the provision of telephones. It was also a shock for me to find that piped water was a problem, which it is even to this day as there are still a few tail-ends to be finished, despite the huge progress made during our last period in government. I hope this Government continues with the CLÁR programme but we are told it is cancelled in regard to getting the last mile of piped water into houses for the people.

Yes, it was a shock. Perhaps it was because I was used to these things as just being given, as most city people were, that it was a shock that they did not exist for everybody, and services that were taken as basic in the city were not available universally on this very small island. Therefore, I am not sure the Minister has the monopoly of wisdom about rural Ireland.

I can tell him one thing about running businesses in rural Ireland with the services that were there. We move slowly and while we have the rural broadband scheme, we are still very deficient in broadband because, again, competition has not worked in that area. If we want a model of how not to do it, it is there. For example, we have three masts in one area and no mast in another area, with a very bad service in one area and duplicate and triplicate services in other areas.

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