Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on what is a hugely important issue for many people in rural Ireland and in my constituency of Kildare South. In my seven years as a Deputy in the House I have spoken on the issue of broadband on a number of occasions. I acknowledge the progress that has been made from when I first spoke on this matter. Many areas of Kildare have high-speed broadband now that did not have it when it started out. In Kildare South we are a mixed constituency of urban and rural. Those pockets of rural south Kildare that do not have the broadband still feel it.

I do not need to tell the Minister about the importance of broadband and how it impacts on people's lives in so many different ways. It impacts on family life and people's ability to share their entertainment together as a family with new means of live streaming television and Netflix and so on. Not having that ability is a huge frustration when one's neighbours have it.

It affects families in an educational context also when the children come home from school. They may have had iPads in school but struggle to do that work at home. It affects small businesses too. While there are some people in houses who have received broadband and do not know themselves since, I am aware of one constituent who needed to download a large file so he drove to a hotel carpark 15 minutes away. He sat in his car while robbing the hotel Wi-Fi on his laptop so he could send or download a large file.

People who work in the agricultural sector and farmers now do all their systems online. In the equine sector people want to buy horses online, for example, and they look at sales in France and other places. They may be selling a foal and cannot follow on with it. If they do not have high-quality broadband, they have to travel to the sales and miss out on the work at home, along with all the work that goes with that.

The ability of people to work from home is also affected. Consider all of the congestion. A lot of this is linked up to the national planning framework. We talk about taking pressure off our roads. Broadband can allow people to work at home and not have to spend all those hours on the M50. They can also have that quality of life element to be home with their kids, collect them from school and help them with their homework. There is a frustration for those people who do not have broadband. Broadband is very much like oxygen. If people have it they do not even realise they are breathing and they do not think about it too much. For those without it, however, it is the biggest frustration in the world. I accept that the scale and nature of the national broadband plan is a massive undertaking. Given the money that is being invested, it is important that the system is future-proofed and that the fibre to the homes is the best system. While my own dwelling has wireless and it does for now, I am aware that the future capacity of the household will not be matched by that. This is why the long-term plan is the right approach.

We talk about the national broadband plan in the future tense, as something to be rolled out and to be delivered and that is coming our way. I recognise the fact that when this Government started there was 50% coverage around the State. We are now up at 71% and by the end of this year we are on target to be at 77%. A lot of that delivery is because of the national broadband plan, and because of it, many of the places in Kildare that did not have broadband a number of years ago have it now. The plan drove the private sector to put in the €2.75 billion worth of private investment in the past five years. I recognise this. Our focus, and the frustration of the Deputies in the House, is now on the remaining percentages. As we work down the numbers, these are the hardest to reach houses that will be the most difficult. Given the scale of the project, it is understandable that the final percentage will be the hardest to reach premises that will take the most time and the most cost to the taxpayer, but at no cost to the dweller. We recognise the importance of this infrastructure. This is on the same scale as the electrification of Ireland in the 1920s. The problem with percentages and projections is that the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment has issued many of these in the past and, for a variety of reasons, some of the projections have slipped. This was long before the Minister's time. This has, however, led to frustrations. I do not for one minute doubt the Minister's conviction and his determination. If there is an issue with the public confidence in the Department, it is that some percentages have slipped in the past.

With regard to Eir pulling out of the plan last week, I do not accept the argument of Opposition parties trying to tell us that the best way to deal with it is to stop, down tools, not do anything else and navel gaze for the next six months or beyond. I also do not accept that we should tell the bidder who stuck with the process all the way through, and who is backed up SSE, John Laing and some very credible large-scale companies which operate worldwide, that we will walk away from this project now. We are in this now and we have to see it through, but valid questions have to be asked.

I agree with the amended motion on the basis that if the Department were to review the process now, leaving aside the inordinate delay such a review would cause, it would undermine the credibility of the process we are in. It would also lead to a host of other problems. Deputy Martin Kenny can shake his head all he wants but that is a fact. Valid questions, however, must be asked of the Minister and his officials, some of which will be difficult to answer for commercial reasons. Perhaps the Minister will answer them when concluding the debate. While there is no price on this scheme in the public domain, and I would not expect that there would be, I am sure the Minister has a figure in his head and I am sure the Minister for Finance has a figure in terms of the taxpayers' money that we cannot go beyond. I would like some reassurance that state aid rules still apply and that there will be a point at which if Enet looks for too much, it will be told "No". It is not a blank cheque and it should know that. While the Minister cannot publicly talk about a plan B, and I understand that to do so would undermine the process, we must make sure that plan B is a very real and live option. We trust the Minister that it will be there to take out. Rather than stopping a process that people have concerns about, the Minister must drive it on and make it work. He has said he has the conviction to do this, but if it does not happen, then we must have the plan B to look at and to go with. We cannot be held to ransom on this. There are still a lot of cards left to play and we have made huge progress on it.

The 300,000 houses that Eir has committed to do are, I understand, on a contractual basis. The roll-out of that has been a cause of frustration for those who see their neighbours getting it and who do not have it themselves. I welcome the appointment of a broadband officer in every local authority. I have found this very useful. Where broadband was coming on line and where there were local small businesses in rural areas, we were able to contact the broadband officer in the county council and get him or her to make the case back through Eir for that. It has proven a very important aspect where there is an economic ability and where there are jobs involved.

Right now we have delivered 71% high-speed broadband around the State in a project of massive scale the likes of which has not been seen for a generation. By the end of this year we will be at 77%. We are united behind the Minister in driving on to ensure we hit that 100% as soon as possible. We are mindful of the fact that the hardest places to reach will be the ones that will take the most amount of time. The prize is a big one for us. When we talk about the national planning framework and what we will look like in 20 or 30 years, we look at the kind of Ireland we want and the extra one million people who will live in the State. We want 75% of that population growth to be outside of cities. For me as a rural dweller who is surrounded by green fields, the most important element of that is connectivity in transport and in broadband. We talk of addressing both of those issues. The national planning framework looks at 20 years from now and this is big vision stuff. The frustrations of the couple of years of slippage we have had with regard to hitting the 100% target will be looked back upon over a ten or 20 year period. The scale of the project we took on will also be seen. The big prize is the quality of life and the quality of jobs. As I said earlier, this will affect families, small businesses and all the knock-on impacts in the local communities. Parents will be at home in the evening to bring their children to the GAA club and to help out and volunteer. They will be able to use the local shops and support them. They will be involved in the community and voluntary sector in a better way because they can work from home and have a quality of life at home with all the different benefits that brings. It will take pressure off our cities and larger areas, and it will take away the drudgery of the commute that does not need to happen on such a large scale if we have that plan. Connectivity is at the heart of all this. It is at he heart of everything we will talk about in the coming weeks.

We are with the Minister and we are completely committed to seeing the delivery through. We wish the Minister well in this endeavour, but I urge him and his officials behind the scenes to have that plan B and not let us be hostages to fortune in the situation we are in. This is not a situation that anybody wanted to be in, but I completely disagree with any suggestion that we should walk away from that process or throw it up in the air, as it were. From a political perspective, if we were to do that, the very same Opposition parties that asked for it would attack us for doing so. It would be politically expedient for them.

The right thing to do here is to drive on with this process and plan for all eventualities.

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