Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his reply. The response from the European Commission, which the departmental officials have accepted, is not acceptable. The Minister of State said “If service providers are prohibited from recovering those wholesale costs directly from retail users, it is inevitable they will seek to recover the costs from other users or reduce volume limits”. That is code for saying we are going to protect the profits of the multinational companies. It is not acceptable that once again the interests of the international mobile phone companies come ahead of the consumer.

In 2013, Commissioner Kroes told her peers in the Commission and the European Parliament that she wanted them to be able to return to their constituents and say they had been able to end mobile phone roaming costs. That has not happened and is not happening. No matter how it is presented, roaming charges will stay with us in a different format. If the annual profits of these international mobile phone companies operating throughout the European Union were analysed, we would be startled by the returns they make for their shareholders. There is the added difficulty of poor mobile coverage. Those companies have got away without investing in infrastructure. If one is on a phone call for more than two or three minutes, particularly travelling northwards from the city, as the Minister of State and I know, every call drops out. It is scandalous how little investment the mobile phone companies have put into the infrastructure to ensure there is a quality service. Phone traffic has increased annually but there has been no worthwhile investment to ensure the consumer who is paying for the service gets a proper service. The reply is most disappointing from the point of view that the European Union is saying it must tell the telephone companies how it will make up for their losses if it reduces mobile phone roaming charges. It is not acceptable. It is time the interests of the consumers were put first.

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