Brian Stanley (Laois, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The problem with the Minister's position is that he is basing it on the hope that the Enet procurement process will not collapse. The Department and the Government must have a plan B but the Minister has not outlined such a plan. He said options are being considered, but that is within the current tendering process with just Enet involved. Some of the seeds of this disaster were sown when Eir announced the connections to 300,000 easy to reach households. While that is good and dandy for those households, as I pointed out to the Minister many times, the 540,000 homes and businesses outside of that process will be the difficult ones. That has allowed for a stranglehold of the system and yet another mistake in the entire procurement process.

Has a public ownership option ever been examined seriously by the Department? We have large pieces of State infrastructure. ESB Networks is serving 99.9% of the population. There is fibre cable running along the railway tracks. There is a back-haul system owned by the State of which we have a comprehensive map. There is also the metropolitan areas network system, MANS, so we have the MANS, ESB Networks and the back-haul system.

The Minister told me over two weeks ago that if he were doing the process all over again, he would do it differently. What exactly would he do differently? I am curious to know what he meant by that.

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