Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Michael Moynihan for facilitating the timing of this debate. He was seeking to have it earlier but I could not be present then in person.

I will put the situation in perspective. I am relatively recently in the post. The position on to the national broadband plan is that, as Deputy Moynihan said, it has been at the inception stage for some time. Part of that is to be delivered by commercial operators. The plan is to achieve high-speed broadband for every home in the country. Since the plan was initiated in 2012, the proportion of homes that get access to high-speed broadband has increased from 30% to 52% in 2016 to 74% currently. There is a very substantial uptake in the proportion of people with high-speed broadband and that is all being delivered commercially.

When it comes to the intervention or amber area, as it is described, where we will provide a State subsidy for delivering broadband, those are strictly confined to areas where the commercial sector says it will not deliver. Under state aid rules, if the commercial sector opts to make provision for any area, it has to be carved out once it commits to delivering it to the standard that has been specified. That is what happened in respect of Eir. Originally, it was an intervention area of 750,000 homes but Eir said it would commit to delivering to 300,000 homes directly, and it is in the course of rolling that out. At the last count, I heard broadband had been delivered to 225,000 homes. As the Deputy has said, there are a number of areas of frustration involved. Sometimes Eir has not yet fulfilled what it said it would do. We are tracking households or areas where a commitment was made to deliver broadband, and some of them may have to go back into the intervention area and the state-aided support.

There are others who did not put up their hands for Eir but who are very close to people to whom it has given a commitment to deliver a commercial service. I know that it is a source of frustration if the fibre has been laid half way up the road and not completed, but in most instances that is the way Eir bids. It bid for what it believed it could serve commercially. If the Deputy looks at the map, he will see it. It is like a spider that is set out on it and it ends abruptly on roads where the connection does not extend any further. The Deputy asked if I could intervene. I cannot intervene to instruct Eir to do X or Y. I could say that if it was not delivering, it should take them back into the intervention area. If, after a discussion with it, it became clear that it was not able to do it, it would be brought back into the intervention area.

On the broadband plan, the final tender was submitted in September. As there is only one final tenderer, the House will understand we have had to engage in much more careful due diligence which has taken more time, but the Taoiseach is right. The aim is to try to provide a recommendation for the Government in or around Easter. The Taoiseach signalled in the House that while his objective would be to consider the issue at Easter, the handling of Brexit in the weeks around this period could see that objective deferred to some degree, but it is not intended to be a significant deferral, if it occurs. I am aiming to bring forward a proposal on which the Government can make a decision. As the Deputy rightly said, the project has become more expensive because of the diminished area. We have to service 96% of the area in which only 23% of the population exist. The numbers I have show that 184,183 people in Cork have access to high-speed broadband. Another 11,000 will be served by Eir in the company's ongoing deployment of a high speed broadband network. That will leave 74,820 premises to receive broadband using the intervention model. They are in what is called the amber area.

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