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

It is a letter of 14 or 15 pages. That is why the Government spent four hours in its meeting on Tuesday talking through these issues and getting detailed explanations from the Minister, Deputy Bruton, as to the response to some of the concerns raised by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. I am satisfied that those questions have been answered. This is about laying 147,000 km of fibre. It is about delivering speeds of 150 Mbps increasing to 500 Mbps from year ten. It is about ensuring that customers in rural Ireland are charged the same as in urban Ireland, which costs the State significant amounts of money. That is what we are committing to. The contract is not just about rolling out fibre and delivering the speeds, however. It is also about operating it for the next 25 to 35 years. It also ensures that the risk management linked to this project is by and large carried by the bidder. If there is down-side risk, in other words, if there is not sufficient uptake of this infrastructure, that risk is carried solely by the bidder. If there is more uptake than is anticipated, the benefit is shared by the State in terms of claw-back. Let us not forget that there are conditions in this arrangement, which will become a contract, whereby the State essentially pays in arrears. The infrastructure is delivered first, we meet certain targets and then we pay out. The bidder needs to provide the working capital, which is significant, to be able to build out that infrastructure in the meantime until they meet the targets which will trigger staged payments as the infrastructure is rolled out. As the Minister, Deputy Bruton, has said, they have looked at the risk and management of this up, down and inside out to ensure we have provided as much certainty as possible from the State for one of the most important infrastructure roll-outs that we have seen in a generation.

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