Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I carry no torch for Eir, but it is a little bit rich of the Minister to criticise Eir or any commercial company for their inability to deliver on commitments. This has been at the Government's door - a Government that the Minister is part of - since 2012. At that stage high-speed broadband was supposed to have been rolled out within three years. We are now in 2017 and a tender has not issued. The Minister must start concentrating on the component that falls at the Government's door, which is the intervention area; the piece that is not commercially viable that the State must fund. The Minister must get the tender documents together and pick a date. He speaks of the project being for 25 years but from the time it was talked about in 2012 it will be 25 years before it will even have started. While the Minister, Deputy Naughten, thinks that dates are not important I am sure he is dealing with constituents on a daily basis and knows there are children in schools who need access to high-speed broadband to do their studies and reports. These students will have gone through the entire cycle of secondary and tertiary education and still there will be no broadband in their homes. It is important. The Minister is telling us it will be a 25 year plan and that it must be done big. This is fine, but it is having an impact on the daily lives of so many families and small businesses in their inability to gain access to high-speed networks. I hear stories from families where the parents are dropping their children into towns with laptops and iPads to go in to Starbucks, McDonald's or Milano's and such places, in order to get internet access so they can prepare for exams. This is pathetic. People are looking for the Minister to show an understanding of the seriousness of the issue and put in place a deadline, which would force people in the Department, and people who support it, to meet those deadlines. We need action here.

See this speech in context