Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister's response is as ridiculous as if José Mourinho, when asked about the performance of Manchester United, were to respond by telling us how Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool are doing. I asked the Minister to outline on numerous occasions in this House where the Government is at in respect of the national broadband plan in providing high-speed broadband to those 542,000 homes. He comes in week after week and month after month telling us what Eir, Siro and Virgin Media are doing. I know what they are doing. They are not State secrets. Those companies communicate with me and I communicate with them, as does everybody else. What is farcical is that the Minister created a situation in an arrangement with Eir that put in place a scenario whereby it rolled out fibre to certain areas and then stopped. There are people on the other end whose appetite has been whetted. They have seen the fibre come so far but no further. They cannot understand why fibre goes as far as a certain house but ten adjacent houses are not connected and have no idea when they will be connected. The reality is that they are the prize for Eir or Enet, whoever ultimately wins the contract. Those people now need clarity from the Minister.

The Minister should set out the situation for us clearly and give us an indicative date. There must be a project plan or Gantt chart somewhere. That is standard operational practice with any contract. I ask the Minister to set out for us clearly when he hopes to sign off on the deal. If it runs over by a month or two I will not beat him up about it. He will at least have drawn a line in the sand and then he can set out clearly from there the length of the project. This is not rocket science. It just takes a little bit of initiative on his side and gives some certainty to the people who are seeing the fibre come within a snowball's distance of their door but they have been left waiting. They cannot understand why they cannot get connected.

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