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

The €500 million estimate was for the project Deputy Broughan was advocating, which was just bringing fibre to the 1,100 villages, and that was as far as it would go. In terms of getting to 540,000 premises, or, as it then was, 750,000 premises, it would be for commercial interests to bring it from the village out to all of those individual premises. That was rejected as an inadequate approach. The next big escalation in cost was, of course, the decision that had to be taken when Eir said it would commercially deliver 300,000 of these premises, which meant that had to be carved out of the intervention area, which had been 750,000 premises. Some Deputies expressed scepticism as to why that had to be done. It had to be done because, under state aid rules, if a commercial entity is offering to deliver it, one cannot offer state aid to someone else to do it. That is an obligation of state aid rules. It was communicated to us by the EU but also confirmed by the legal experts at the time that decision was taken.

Those were among the decisions but there is also the risk assessment of the market. It is only when the competitive dialogue was complete that one would get an understanding of how risk was assessed of lower than expected take-up, of more difficult terrain and all the things that we know are involved in reaching out to 100% of the population. As the last quarter occupies 96% of the territory, this service has to go through 96% of the land area to reach just a quarter of the population. That is a significant challenge.

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