Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Before Eir signed a contract with the Minister it had committed publicly to rolling out fibre broadband to 300,000 houses. Can the Minister confirm that Ireland is unusual in having a very high percentage of the population living in non-agglomerated areas? People call them rural areas, I call them the people with bigger back gardens. One would think there was some awful magic at work because we do not all have to live on top of each other. No matter what the world is doing it was a very simple objective for us in this island to decide that within the part of this State that we control that every house would have fibre broadband. That was not rocket science.

The Minister talks about overhanging trees and replacing poles. They have been doing that since the telephone was invented. Can the Minister give me a date on which he thinks that he would sign a contract with some company to provide broadband under the national broadband scheme?

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