Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy should listen to me. It was obsolete the day it went live. The problem is that there have been Ministers in the past who thought it was just as simple as that and we ended up with the disaster we have now. There are people around Ireland at the moment who are relying on the national broadband scheme and it is appalling. We are not even a decade down the road from that having been introduced.

We are rolling out a network that will stand the test of time, just as electricity did in the past when colleagues in this House at the time said who in God’s name will be using all of this electricity that we are generating, that we started 90 years ago in Ardnacrusha. We were the first country in the world to bring electricity to every single home. There have been tomes published on how that happened. There will not be the same on this. It will be one small chapter in the story of Ireland because it will happen quickly and every single home will get access to high speed broadband.

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