Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

This Government is completely incapable of delivering major infrastructural projects of huge importance to the people, our economy and society. That is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the shambles that continues to unfold around rural broadband. For our part, People Before Profit from the beginning opposed the model for delivering this vitally important project which we all want to see happen and which rural Ireland desperately needs. We said all along that the privatised, outsourced, tendering out model simply could not deliver the infrastructure that we need, that it would cost us a fortune and land us in the sort of mess we are in now. We have been thoroughly vindicated in that. The inability of the State to deliver vital infrastructure goes back further, but the common thread in our failure in this regard is privatisation, going right back to Fianna Fáil's disastrous decision to privatise Bord Telecom, the asset stripping of that company by mostly Irish vulture capitalists, which denuded us and the State of its capacity to deliver vital communications infrastructure. If the left-wing concern and criticism of this process was not taken seriously, and it rarely is, it seems today that those concerns have been absolutely vindicated by the letter from Robert Watt outlining his concerns about this project where effectively a single consortium in what is supposed to be a competitive process has the State over a barrel. When the most senior civil servant in the area of public expenditure says we should not go ahead with this, that we cannot trust that the tenderer has the interest in carrying it through, and that there is a massive risk that it will not be delivered, it is quite astonishing that the Government perseveres. The only explanation for this announcement is that it is a pre-election stunt to make people in rural Ireland, who are rightly desperate to have infrastructure and services, believe that this Government is championing their interests. It is deeply ironic that the Government would present itself as the champion of rural Ireland given the way it has denuded rural Ireland of post offices and public transport services. It cannot be trusted to deliver broadband.

There are many other concerns about this, not just those that Robert Watt outlines. Is there, for example, the potential for legal action to be taken by other bidders in the market against the way this is proceeding? What about the cases that are pending against Actavo and Denis O'Brien and so on in respect of Siteserv? There are many serious questions about the capacity of this consortium, one which, by the way, bears absolutely no relationship, apart from the presence of Granahan McCourt, to the original consortium that put forward the bid. This process is fatally flawed. We should stop it now. We have said this several times already. What we need is for rural broadband to be delivered directly via a State company, either through the ESB or through a State telecommunications company. As Deputy Bríd Smith has said, if we had relied on this model to deliver rural electrification, we would still be operating by candlelight. We should not take that risk with something as important as this.

We must break from the privatisation, outsourcing, for-profit model. The State must deliver this vital infrastructure directly and own it at the end of the process.

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