Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The resignation of the Minister, Deputy Naughten, is the crescendo of a totally failed and shambolic process of privatisation of a key infrastructural project for the State. He made reference during his resignation speech to the fact the Taoiseach did not have confidence in him. If that is the case, the Taoiseach needs to come in immediately to give us his side of the story. Why did he not have confidence in the Minister?

I certainly came in here - and all Members of the Opposition have indicated the same - with an open mind as to what the fate of the Minister, Deputy Naughten, should be but that he did have to answer serious questions about the contacts he had with David McCourt, whether they were appropriate and whether they breached the rules of the tendering process. I do not know the answer to these questions but I do know that the process of rolling out the national broadband plan has been a shambolic disaster, which has reached its culmination in the resignation of the Minister and him telling us that his boss, the Taoiseach, did not have confidence in him.

We need to know the answer and, more importantly, the people of rural Ireland need to know the answer, because they are the victims of this failed process. This has its origins in the decision to privatise Eircom in the 1990s. It has gone from one failure to another. Clearly the current process is completely contaminated. We are now left with only one bidder, with whom the Minister had these contacts, who is the subject of legal action by a company in the United States because apparently while he was negotiating with this company regarding a possible takeover, he was also negotiating with the ISIF, which then bought him out. Another component to the consortium, Actavo, is being investigated regarding the sale of Siteserv by the IBRC. What a mess. It is a mess that was produced from the process of privatising and outsourcing key infrastructural projects. My God, we would never have had the ESB if we had had this sort of process to establish a company to electrify the State. This is the mess we get into when we outsource and privatise key infrastructural projects. When we add it all up, the Government stands indicted. It is a shambles on national broadband, a shambles on housing, a shambles on the health service and a shambles on climate change as we saw in the recent report.

Those basic matters have been left in a mess and now we have a bizarre twist of events with the Minister resigning because the Taoiseach had no confidence in him. The Government has some questions to answer.

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