Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss this very important issue. Fianna Fáil will be supporting this motion. The Minister is aware that to this generation, broadband is what running water and electricity were to previous generations. It is of that magnitude and importance. The digital divide between urban and rural areas, and semi-urban and rural areas, is brought into stark focus daily. We have just come back to the House after the Christmas period which has given us all an opportunity to spend more time with our constituents than is normally possible.

As children were given gifts and new technologies were purchased in homes over Christmas, the difficulty associated with being unable to connect to the Internet at speeds required for people to live their lives with the kind of comforts and expectations they have come to expect became clear. I refer to students home from college preparing reports or for exams, schoolkids doing their homework and people trying to develop their small and medium enterprises in rural and semi-urban areas. They had ongoing difficulties in connecting to and communicating with the Internet because of the slow pace of this Government in rolling out broadband to any appreciable level. There is no point in even mentioning high-speed broadband.

This is something that, sadly, goes back to commitments given in 2012, principally by Fine Gael. The national broadband plan has been in gestation since then. I do not intend to bore the House by going back ad nauseamon all of the dates and times missed during that period. We find ourselves in a situation where, sadly, the Minister is still supporting the principle of the competitive dialogue. Notwithstanding what competitive dialogue processes have delivered in other jurisdictions and at other times, we have to accept that it is a monumental failure in the context of this project. It has left us in a situation where we have just one bidder. The Minister has rightly identified that requires him to go into the granular detail of the cost structure. That is not something he would have had to do if other bidders had remained in the bidding process. It would be useful for the Minister, if he has not done this to date, to communicate with those parties that did not remain in the process. I accept that since the Minister came to office in this particular Department he has had many issues to deal with.

If he gets an opportunity to go back and read the PwC report which sets out the purpose of encouraging those existing players into the process, he will find that it referred to the benefits to the State of existing operators being able to leverage the infrastructure they already had. That infrastructure already in place would also benefit the taxpayer in being able to spread the costs over that network and speed up the roll out. The competitive dialogue process has, effectively, pushed out those companies. I accept that has happened for different reasons. It has, however, left us with an entity that has no experience in broadband provision. We are left now with a private finance house from Boston with some subcontractors here. I do not believe that is a good way to proceed. It is not in the interests of the State or of the people who have been waiting on the promise of high-speed broadband since 2012.

I have had the opportunity to engage with this process for quite some time. The people I have spoken to who are affected by this in rural and semi-urban areas are deeply frustrated because of the impact it is having on their lives. They do not believe anything from any side of this House at this stage. I do not think they even tune in anymore when we talk about broadband. Those people just do not believe that it is going to happen. Perhaps the strategy of some within the Minister's Government is that the longer this is played out, the more likely it is that people will be burned out and then they will make do with what they have. If that is the case, we will see the continuous erosion of life in rural Ireland.

We have to move on from what has happened. We have to get to a point where the Government commits to whatever it is going to commit to and put in place whatever financial resources it is in a position to put behind this project. I assure the Minister that this side of the House will accept nothing less than the provision of high-speed broadband to all of the homes in rural Ireland, taking into account the plethora of technologies that can be deployed and still give the kind of speeds that are expected and necessary. I refer in particular to the last mile.

The issues which this motion raises, the delivery of the national broadband plan, the competitiveness of the project, the long-term viability of the remaining bidder and the affordability of the project, are all concerns shared on this side of the House and expressed previously. I do not propose to rehearse the timeline for how we got to this point, other than to provide my own understanding of the situation we find ourselves in within days of the award of one of the largest contracts this State has seen in modern times. The former Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Naughten, resigned. We know about that and why it happened. It was as a result of his inappropriate communication with Mr. David McCourt of Granahan McCourt, the sole remaining bidder. If Granahan McCourt's bid is not accepted there is no clear pathway to the delivery of the plan. If the bid is accepted, questions remain as to the capacity of that entity, based on its experience or lack thereof, to deliver against the exacting timelines and in an environment where the availability of contractors is questionable, based on the limited number of skilled personnel in the State and, indeed, outside of it.

Whatever plan the Minister intends to announce, therefore, it is vitally important that he is upfront and honest. It is important that he sets out from the start clear timelines as to when he expects a tender to be signed, when he expects work to begin, the rate at which work will be completed and when the final connection is to be made. That is really important and we need to see in what areas, counties and regions broadband is to be delivered within particular timescales and timelines. That will be a difficult political decision for the Minister and for the Government. We all understand that. If the Minister and the Government are at least upfront and honest, and people know it will be quarter 4 of 2021, quarter 3 of 2022 or quarter 1 of 2025 before the project is completed, then people will accept that. They will accept that outcome if it is real, verifiable and if they can expect, based on the Minister's recommendations, that it is actually going to happen.

We do not need another fudge. We do not need soft language that gives everyone a sense of a warm feeling. That will not work anymore because people are absolutely burned out on this issue. People will accept that it is perhaps going to be longer than they had originally envisaged, so long as that is set out in clear terms. I think, however, that the issues regarding the national broadband plan date back much further than some of the issues mentioned. By the time the former Minister met with McCourt in New York, both SIRO and Eir had dropped out of the process and SSE was soon to follow. That speaks to the difficulties that existed with the competitive dialogue process. It is important that the Government takes stock of what has happened and tries to ascertain how or why it has happened in this way so that the same process is not used again.

Sadly, the Peter Smyth report skirted around the issue. He failed to accept that there was a lobbying intent by Mr. McCourt. All of those meetings, texts and phone calls did not happen because Mr. McCourt liked the former Minister, or vice versa, and that they needed to be having meals, dinners and texts on that basis. In the case of Mr. McCourt, in my view, he did so on the basis that he was seeking to curry favour with the Government and the former Minister. That breaches the principles set out in the guidelines for bidding for this particular project. Mr. Smyth has been complimented, but any fair-minded assessment will find that Mr. Smyth delivered what the Government wanted. When I questioned him before a committee, he made it very clear that he has never had an adverse finding in any of his audit reports. That seems bizarre.

He failed to look at the basic issue of canvassing. He accepted canvassing took place at a minimum at the dinner in New York only because there were minutes taken of the meeting. He accepted, however, the assertions of the former Minister and Mr. McCourt that, on at least three occasions when they held private meetings, the national broadband plan was never discussed. While I do not want to assign any wrongdoing to any individual, it is impossible to believe no discussion took place around the national broadband plan between these two individuals when they met on at least three occasions with no officials present.

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