Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The motion before the House is welcome. High quality, affordable broadband is critical for households, schools and businesses across rural and urban Ireland. Let us not forget that there are many parts of urban Ireland that have terrible connectivity as well. The national broadband plan is flawed in a number of very important ways, but it is nonetheless an ambitious plan and will put Ireland on the map in terms of digital connectivity.

The Minister is right to compare this to the electrification of rural Ireland in terms of the transformational effect it can have. It is a significant public investment and will cover about 900,000 homes and drive the availability of broadband in Ireland for the next 25 years and more. With this in mind, we must ensure that the fundamentals are right, and I suggest that several of the fundamentals suggested by the Minister are far from right. First of all, the minimum speeds are far too low. A speed of 30 Mbps now barely qualifies as broadband. Broadband is defined now as connectivity above 25 Mbps, yet we are putting in a national system that will have 30 Mbps. It needs to be at least 100 Mbps, and arguably far more than that. We need to see much more emphasis on consistency of speeds. Many businesses cannot afford the frequent disconnection that occurs. I am aware of a company in Wicklow whose connection is so unstable that it couriers its data to Dublin on disc rather than using the network.

There needs to be far more transparency in the system. There is no accessible asset register. Nobody knows where the backhaul is right now. There is no transparency in terms of business-to-business pricing. Nobody knows how much it costs and how much the owners of the backhaul network are charging. There is no accurate mapping of broadband speeds. We have nonsense figures from the providers. I set up a project in Wicklow under which we measured speeds, and there was no comparison between what the service providers were telling people they were paying for and what was actually being received. There is very little consumer representation at ComReg; in fact, people I have spoken to have suggested that there has been very serious regulatory capture.

Most importantly, I will repeat what Deputy after Deputy has said here. Privatising the broadband network is an extraordinary and massive mistake. It is not one of these little mistakes that people make all the time. The Minister compared it to the electrification of rural Ireland. We would never sell the power distribution network to Northern Ireland. Critically, we must look at who will be owning it. Two of the three short-listed bidders are companies owned by US investment funds. Think about that. Imagine a US investment owning Ireland's power distribution network. That is what is being suggested. What is going to happen? The network will be managed in the interests of the shareholders of those investment funds. This is critical social and economic infrastructure for the next several decades and it may be owned by investment managers from the US. That is bonkers. It is exactly the kind of thing that happened with Eircom. There was under-investment. We are now in this situation. I implore the Minister to go back to the Cabinet and say: "If it costs the State an extra billion quid over 25 years, thank you, we'll take it. We'll happily pay it." If the only other reason is that we would have to wait an extra six to 12 months over a 25-year programme, that is fine. Let us take it and own the thing at the end of that time.

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