Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State, Deputy Breen, is missing from the Chamber. There is a wonderful attendance from Fine Gael tonight, but one of the men involved in this is missing, and everyone should know that his title is Minister of State with responsibility for trade, employment, business, the EU digital Single Market and data protection. How can anyone claim that a Minister of State with such responsibility has nothing to do with the communications industry or the broadband plan? He should at least be here to answer questions. That must happen. Otherwise, this charade is long from over.

I was struck by the Taoiseach's statement last Friday in Bailieborough. He said there was a problem because the Minister, Deputy Naughten, had dinners with one bidder for a billion euro State contract and not with all of them. This goes to the heart of the problem in this House and with this State that despite all the new rules we have brought in on transparency etc., we have not changed much from previous days, which have been mentioned. There is a symbiotic relationship in this Parliament between Ministers, civil servants and the wealthy business elite. The decision to privatise telecoms lies at the heart of this.

I know from a reply I received to a question I asked last week, and I want to share this with the House, that €18 million has so far been spent on the competitive tendering process for the provision of broadband services. Guess what it was spent on - competitively tendering for advice on how we competitively tender for the provision of broadband services. I ask the Government to stop pretending we are not engaged in a bizarre, Byzantine process that costs public money and yields poor services and results for the State and its people. This applies to broadband, housing, health and CervicalCheck. Despite all the promises of change, this is what we get time and again. Effectively, we own Enet. It is a publicly funded outlet that exists only because we tendered for 90 towns and villages to be serviced with broadband, involving 75% of the State's infrastructure fund.

I ask the House to look at the charade of how we are refusing to deliver proper public services. I echo the call for the Government to go back to the people on all these crucial issues-----

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