Brian Stanley (Laois, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has been saying for a week that the tender process is competitive and everything is okay with it but he knows and I know that it was significantly skewed once SIRO pulled out. It is also skewed by the fact that Eir has gone in and cherry-picked the 300,000 households. I welcome every connection that is made. We want to see connections. However, if a county council wants to put a new front door on a house and the front door costs €501, it has to get three tenders for it. Any public body or local county council doing that type of work would have to get three tenders for it. Here we have a multi-million pound project with hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money going into it, but we have no control over it and this House, the democratically elected Parliament of the State, has no answers at this point, and we are this far down the road.

The reason it is complex is it is a muddle and a mess. I told the Minister that this has become the plaything of capitalism. It is no longer a State broadband scheme. All the taxpayer will do is shovel the money into it. That is my concern. On its roll-out, the 300,000 Eir households will not cover huge areas that are awaiting the national broadband plan. A constituent of mine who is living between Geashill and Mountmellick and is running a business has almost no broadband. It is chronically slow. Eir is rolling out to within 800 m of that business but it cannot get coverage across the length of six football fields. This constituent contacted the Department directly and was told that the Department thought it would take three to five years before they would get it. These people cannot wait five years. The businesses in counties Laois and Offaly and other counties throughout the country cannot wait five years for it.

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