Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The story of rural broadband is a damning indictment of the love affair of establishment parties with privatisation. In 2007, 2012 and 2014, all Ministers with responsibility for communications promised broadband for rural Ireland. In reality, over 800,000 houses in rural Ireland have no access to broadband. To give the debate historical context, I note the hypocrisy of Fianna Fáil in tabling this motion when it was the party which privatised Telecom Éireann in 1999. We all know what has happened since. The hundreds of thousands of people who bought shares in that privatised company lost 30% of their money. The only winners in that plunder were vulture capitalists. Even worse, albeit it is only a footnote to the debate, two banks, Merrill Lynch and AIB, made €94 million from the flotation debacle. It makes me nauseous when I see that. The new company, Eircom, was sold a number of times and had its assets plundered in turn to pay huge dividends to vulture capitalists. In the orgy of greed and privatisation, they saw no need to invest in broadband facilities, in particular in rural parts of Ireland. This is the legacy with which people in rural Ireland are faced.

The latest events further evidence the cherry-picking that goes along with the national broadband plan. Eir was allowed to cherry-pick 300,000 homes, or one third of those in need of the service. Why were these 300,000 homes removed from the overall tender for broadband? We can only assume these were the easiest and most profitable houses to connect. The effect of this was that the third bidder, SIRO, pulled out of the tender process. After that, Eir got its way and also pulled out to leave a sole bidder to supply broadband in Ireland. That company is Enet. It makes one wonder whether this was the intention all along and whether a sweetheart deal was done with these multinational companies to determine who would be the end bidder. The whole saga is an absolute debacle and the losers are the people in rural Ireland who cannot access broadband, which is something I take for granted where I live.

In fact, for most people in Dublin having 4G broadband is something they take for granted, yet other citizens cannot get access to broadband because of privatisation and the ideological mistakes of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. People living in rural areas have been disadvantaged by their bankrupt policies. If there is anything to come out of this - I know that the Minister will not agree with me ideologically - it is that privatisation does not work. The service needs to be in public ownership to give people what they need. Privatisation has been a complete failure.

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