Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have been, and I have said to the Minister that I am prepared to accept the principle of a broadcasting charge and that it should be extended to those homes, apartments and other places where people do not contribute. We have been unable to sanction people for evasion. We have a situation whereby approximately 14% of the population do not pay a television licence charge. The evasion rate is as low as 5% in the United Kingdom. Much work remains to be done in this regard.

The Minister now wants to extend this charge to the print media. He is now such a believer in quality journalism that he wants to include the broader media. That will probably get him plenty of good headlines in the print media, but I am not so sure.

He has not increased the pie and does not intend to. Whether he is going to cut funds for sound and vision within the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, BAI or take money from RTE, which the previous Government did, I am not sure, but maybe he will help us on that in the days ahead.

I am somewhat concerned that there has been no action plan to roll out broadband. The Minister has identified approximately €15 million to be made available this year to get consultants in place and roll out the contract, but it will be 2022 or 2023 before the rural broadband scheme will get into those areas where it is not commercially available. That is an appalling vista for those of us who live in rural Ireland. We are struggling to accept 2022 or 2023. We need action rather than numerous announcements.

The same is true of enhancing our mobile telephony services. There is nothing in the budget to suggest that the Minister is serious about putting in place the kind of funds that are needed to ensure our mobile network is fit for purpose. I recently attended an event in Limerick hosted by the Irish Business Employers Confederation, IBEC, with several key employers who want to employ highly skilled, professional, competent and mobile young people. They were adamant that they found it extremely difficult to get staff for research and development facilities in the mid-west because they do not have the mobile connection for the kind of communication these people use. They can get high-speed broadband in the workplace but they could not get an assurance that when these people went home or travelled to and from work, they would have connection for social, leisure or business purposes. The same applies to the southern region outside the main centres of population. That is a real problem. If we tell these people that it will be 2022 or 2023 before broadband is rolled out and mobile connection will lag behind that, we have some real problems.

One area the budget has failed to address is our greenhouse gas emissions. There is some work in respect of insulation of homes, but in the transport sector it was a missed opportunity. If we had taken some of the principles applied in places such as Norway, which are at the leading edge of developing a transport system that is fit for purpose and helps reduce greenhouse gases, we would have eliminated benefit-in-kind for electric vehicles and said they should use bus lanes. We would have created more incentives. We are coming nowhere close to the 2020 targets and we need to accelerate our approach.

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