Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The national broadband plan, as the Deputy knows, aims to ensure every home, school and business in Ireland, regardless of how remote or rural, has access to high-speed broadband. We all have a responsibility to work to that end. This is being achieved through a combination of commercial investment across Ireland and a State intervention in those areas, mostly rural, where commercial operators acting alone are unlikely to invest. The national broadband plan has been a catalyst in encouraging investment by the telecoms sector. In 2012, fewer than 700,000, or 30%, of all 2.3 million Irish premises had access to high-speed broadband. Today, 74% of premises can access high-speed broadband.

The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Bruton, has said that he wants to bring the procurement process to a fair and impartial conclusion as quickly as possible. He has stated he will bring a proposal to Government for approval before Easter, in other words, in the next couple of weeks.

The ultimate cost to the State of delivering high-speed broadband to more than 500,000 premises in the intervention area was always going to be determined by the procurement process relating to the national broadband plan. This was part of its design and enables the subsidy required to be identified in advance of the Government making a final decision to proceed. We will, therefore, be making a decision with our eyes wide open in respect of cost. It is clearly not going to be cheap. We will now have to make a decision on whether we want to proceed. The cost is high due to the significant ambition of the project and the scale of the build. This one-off intervention will provide broadband to approximately 540,000 premises and will involve the laying of fibre along more than 100,000 km of road across 96% of the landmass of Ireland. It will result in high speeds of 150 Mbps, which will increase to 500 Mbps by the tenth year. The customer charge needs to be the same in rural and urban areas. The plan involves operating the network in a future-proofed way for the next 25 years.

The Minister is trying to ensure that the test the Deputy suggests, that this be cost-effective, transparent, and sustainable into the future, will be met. He will have to bring a proposal before Cabinet and we will need to make a collective decision. I suspect there will also be a lot of outreach to other parties in this House to ensure that this is done in a fully transparent way. If we make the decision to go ahead with the plan, we will be investing with a full understanding of what it will cost and of what we will get for that expenditure over the next 25 years.

See this speech in context